Archive for the ‘optimization’ Category
Saturday, January 23rd, 2010
By William Seidman
Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations” directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.
Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.
Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise: ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”
We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.
Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Monday, December 21st, 2009
By William Seidman
I’m working with a company that has both a very strong corporate headquarters culture and a very strong sales and field operations culture. But these two vitally important parts – headquarters and sales — are often disconnected from one another and, even worse, at odds with what should be shared goals.
Headquarters designs programs that are forward-looking and innovative but, according to the people on the ground, are difficult to deploy. The result is that the people in sales - in the field - are so focused on daily survival that they tend to produce great short-term financial results, but have neither the time nor the energy to learn new things.
Conflicts between headquarters and sales and operations result in good ideas from headquarters being derided as “fads of the week.” Often the innovative concept is discarded or, if the new idea is tried, immediate revenues may decline.
But when headquarters and the field align around a new idea, the synergy can be powerful.
How to get them to align? Headquarters needs to be more aware of what’s really going on in the field and adjust programs to fit these conditions. Headquarters must reduce its constant pressure for immediate numbers. The field has to be given support for learning something new. This takes time and often results in lagging numbers.
Both changes in behavior are difficult for executives to manage because they require everyone to take some risks.
Cooperating for a change can be nerve-wracking for companies since it simultaneously puts immediate revenue and the future at risk. But our experience has shown us that this cooperation ultimately produces great results.
Posted in best practices, business, company culture, getting change to "stick", management consulting, optimization, organizational change | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 10th, 2009
By Rick Grbavac
Jim Clifton, CEO and Chairman of Gallup, comments in The Gallup Management Journal :
“In the world we’re competing in now, solving problems isn’t about spending money. It’s about understanding and managing ideas and talent — and states of mind. That’s where the new leadership breakthroughs will be. Leaders who can quantify states of mind and make decisions about their constituencies based on that information are the ones who will lead the world.”
This makes perfect sense to me. But when he goes on to say that companies have maxed all of the benefits of performance improvement ideas, I think he has been sitting in his office a little too much. I think leaders have a tendency to want to talk about the next shiny ball and have trouble staying with good ideas that just take time to fully pay off.
The idea of tapping into the ideas, beliefs and actions of the 1 in 10,000 is exactly the right idea. He just left off the part about getting the other 9,999 to embrace those ideas and truly elevate performance.
Posted in best practices, business, company culture, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational culture | No Comments »
Monday, October 12th, 2009
By William Seidman
I’m working in two settings now where there’s a tension between traditional classroom instruction and experiential learning.
Most training organizations like to train, which means classrooms, instructors, and - sometimes -elearning.
Most people prefer to learn, and they learn better when they can immediately apply what they’ve learned.
The art of training is to make classroom content tie tightly to real experience.
The art of experiential learning is to ensure that the right content is learned.
The trainers often want to drive the program, but this really doesn’t work.
Experiential learning is more powerful and effective, though it absolutely needs formal classroom instruction for specific skill building
Most of the people we work with stop talking about training and start talking about “learning activities” that include many forms of experiential learning as well as classrooms and elearning.
This broader definition is a good idea - the best idea - because it leads people to retain what they’ve learned and to be able to apply it to their real world.
Posted in best practices, mentoring, optimization, organizational change, personal change, team learning, training | No Comments »
Thursday, September 17th, 2009
By Rick Grbavac
“He who does not economize will have to agonize.”
– Confucius
My friend in Corvallis, Oregon, real estate agent Alan Deitch, sent me this quote today. It provoked me to stop and think about all of the people who have been laid off during this past year’s recession. Companies have had to ‘economize’ and those laid off have had to ‘agonize.’ I understand the need to reduce costs to reflect sales declines; I am hopeful that we are nearing the bottom. But a better word in the above quote might be “optimize”.
Now is a great time for companies to get the optimal performance from their workforce. Why not build capacity for being nimble as the markets come out of recession? There’s probably never been a better time to figure out what your most effective people are doing and the best ways to get everyone else to do those things.
He or she who does not optimize is toast.
Posted in best practices, business, optimization, organizational change, positive leadership | No Comments »
Wednesday, June 10th, 2009
By William Seidman
Organizations of all stripes are rightfully concerned about their cultures: the shared beliefs, values, attitudes, and and standards that define and guide them. Organizational culture has everything to do with goals and strategies and ultimate success or failure. Culture sets the underlying norms for functioning. Sometimes, culture needs to change.
Organizations as diverse as the Maryland prison system or the British National Health Service are thinking about their culture. Last week Martha Johnson, President Obama’s nominee for administrator of the General Services Administration (the GSA), named “an organizational culture of values and trust” as one of her highest priorities for the agency.
Regardless of the differences - in purpose and practices - every organization needs to talk about its culture, tweak what isn’t working, and continuously find ways to support and reinforce it.
Tags: Barack Obama, company culture, corporate culture, General Services Administration, GSA, Martha Johnson, organizational culture, prison culture
Posted in best practices, business, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change | 1 Comment »
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
By William Seidman
Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Gerry Sindell of Thought Leaders International. Gerry is an expert at helping people transform their loose, disorganized ideas into concrete products, particularly when it comes to writing. In his blog (May 14, 2009) he writes, “I have helped a lot of smart people become successful authors and leaders, and one of my first rules for clients is: you must tell your audience as quickly as possible who you are.”
He wrote The Genius Machine about his methods; it got a great review in Time . Gerry is particularly skilled at seeing the things that others do not, and turning his visions into positive work.
Tags: Gerry Sindell, Thought Leaders International
Posted in leadership, management consulting, optimization, personal change | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
By William Seidman
More on the International Society for Performance Improvement (ISPI)’s annual meeting earlier this month in Orlando, Florida: discussion in the multinational, multicultural session was particularly interesting because of the presenters’ culturally varied experiences. Paul Nieminen is responsible for United Parcel Service’s change programs in Europe and Asia, Al Pacheco is a consultant for IBM doing a cultural diversity program for the major accounts teams, and Karen Waterlander works in Finland for Kone, the fourth-largest manufacturer of - and service provider for - elevators in the world. There were many others — too many to mention. What a great group!
What was amazing was how many things we had in common. Everyone had encountered resistance from each country because of their perceived uniqueness and everyone struggled with having to engage people and sustain change over great distances. Our program seemed to interest many of them, particularly Cerebyte’s international work with Intel, because it solved these problems.
Tags: Al Pacheco, International Society for Performance Improvement, ISPI, Karen Waterlander, Kone, multiculturalism, Paul Nieminen, United Parcel Service, UPS
Posted in management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change | No Comments »
Thursday, February 26th, 2009
By William Seidman
Dr. Michael Posner, Oregon neuroscientist, was recently interviewed by Alvaro Fernandez on the neuroscience of attention/attentiveness and emotional self-regulation. Dr. Posner theorizes that there is a specific portion of the human brain that is used to allocate attention. From this attention comes “effortful control“: the ability to focus attention in order to accomplish a task.
- You can improve your ability to pay attention, making that ability stronger and more effective.
- When you improve attention and attentiveness, performance improves.
We use this notion of attention to focus people on positive deviant content. This teaches people the content, and also teaches them how to attain improved attention. The combination of the two makes for much improved performance.
Tags: Alvaro Fernandez, attention, attentiveness, effortful control, human brain, improving performance, Michael Posner, neuroscience, positive deviant
Posted in neuroscience, optimization, organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
By Michael McCauley
Do you like Dilbert as much as I do? On December 21st Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, takes on organizational change in eight frames. Does this sound familiar? The consultant talks with the Human Resources (HR) director and talks about how he will do an initial diagnostic review, and then form centers of excellence. Next, he will consolidate shared services to drive continuous improvement. In this scenario the organization will be transformed by translating initiatives into actionable tasks.
Of course since Adams is lampooning, by the seventh frame the joke is on the HR director, and on the tired conventional wisdom he’s been spouting.
This is part of why I continue to be excited by the freshness of Kim Cameron’s ideas. Cameron suggests that leaders actively promote a positive climate, positive communications, positive relationships, and positive meaning in their organizations. He posits that this philosophy and its practice will drive growth resulting from people performing at a much higher level.
Does it work? We have found that it does. People and organizations change more quickly and more predictably. The changes are positive and the organization thrives.
Tags: Dilbert, HR, human resources, Kim Cameron, organizational change, positive communications, positive leadership, positive meaning, positive relationships, Scott Adams
Posted in affirmations, best practices, management consulting, optimization, organizational change, positive leadership | No Comments »
