All Posts Tagged With: "focus on the future"
Strategic Human Resources
Fast Company blogger Seth Kahan recently led a roundtable discussion among senior HR professionals about three tough questions they face (article here):
- How does strategic HR drive competitive excellence?
- What skills does HR need to develop to contribute in the C-suite?
- How is talent acquired to build the future, to achieve the organization’s strategic objectives?
The conversation produced these insights:
- HR is positioned to drive competitive excellence if it is fully aligned with business goals. The Baldrige Criteria ask a key question about this: What are your key human resource or workforce plans to accomplish your short- and longer-term strategic objectives and action plans?
- Organizational capacity building is a direct and powerful contribution HR can make if it is fully aligned with the future direction of the enterprise. In addition to the question above, the Baldrige Criteria ask: How do you organize and manage your workforce to address your strategic challenges and action plans?
- Senior HR professionals must be well-versed in business drivers including financials, industry, market circumstances, and competitive intelligence to be considered a player in the C-suite.
- As the world transitions from hierarchical leadership to self-organizing collaboration, HR is positioned to support or drive this shift. The HR section of the Baldrige Criteria addresses this shift by…
The Most Important Question in Strategy
One of the key issues in strategic planning is not directly addressed by the Baldrige Criteria. It occurs during the strategy development phase of the process as participants analyze relevant data and information about factors that will shape the plan and then use their analysis to agree on what should be in the plan. Coming to agreement can be a contentious debate, one opinion competing with another, with decisions made based on who ranks the highest or makes the best argument or outlasts opposing views.
It’s not the best way to chart a course.
Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. He has facilitatestrategic planning sessions. In “My Eureka Moment with Strategy” (HBR, May 3, 2010), he tells the story of a planning session with ten mining company executives that “quickly descended into adversarial position-taking and I could tell it was going nowhere.”
He stopped the descent by asking the executives a different question. Instead of one person making his case and everyone else telling him why he was wrong, Martin asked the executives “to specify what would have to be true for the option on the table to be a fantastic choice.” Instead of competitors,…
6Jul2010 | Steve George | 0 comments | ContinuedManagement’s Five Deadly Diseases
W. Edwards Deming was one of the world’s great management experts, and his thinking helped shape the Baldrige Criteria. Like his friend and peer, Joseph Juran, Deming believed that nearly every problem an organization faces is a problem of management. And he didn’t have a very high opinion of management.
Art Petty reminds us that Deming remains very relevant on his blog, Management Excellence (click here). He links to a 15-minute video in which Deming describes management’s five deadly diseases (click here for video). Despite Deming’s strange speaking style, the video is interesting because he forcefully makes his case against management problems he had identified during decades of work with all types of organizations.
The five deadly diseases are:
- Lack of constancy of purpose. People haven’t decided what business they are in and as a result, they are unable to plan for the future.
- Emphasis on short-term problems—also known as worshiping the quarterly dividend. Leaders have no plan to stay in business by improving the quality of their products and services. Such short-term thinking produces unemployment, which is a sign of bad management, which means there’s a whole lot of bad management still going on in this country today.
- Annual rating of performance. It’s an arbitrary and…
Making Your Organization Adaptable
Last week, Alan Alda spent an hour on “The Human Spark” on PBS exploring why modern man survived and Neanderthals did not. The likely answer? Adaptablity—and it’s still the key to survival.
“There’s probably no organizational attribute that’s more important today than adaptability,” writes Gary Hamel, author and the world’s leading expert on business strategy, according to Fortune magazine. “In our topsy turvy world, every organization is teetering on the brink of irrelevance, and unless it can change as fast as change itself, it will soon tumble off the ledge.”
Baldrige organizations promote adaptability by valuing agility, a focus on the future, and a systems perspective. They constantly and systematically renew themselves by questioning what markets to serve and what the customers in their markets require, how to make their processes more efficient, and how to engage their employees in change and innovation. Rather than reacting to change, they deploy processes that help them adapt and grow.
In “Outrunning Change—the CliffsNotes Version” on WSJ Blogs (October 21, 2009, click on Part 1 here and Part 2 here), Hamel shares his thoughts on how to build a highly adaptable company:
Anticipation
- Face up to strategy decay.
- Learn from the fringe. “The future will sneak up on you unless you…
The Priorities of Leadership
“The more senior your management position is, the more important it is to connect the organization or the project to the outside world,” said Alan Mulally, president and chief executive officer of Ford. “How does this fit in with what we’re doing? What is the real goal, the real mission? And it makes you think about: What business are we in?”
The comments come from an interview for The New York Times, “Planes, Cars and Cathedrals,” published online on September 5, 2009. Throughout the interview, Mulally addressed the first questions asked in the first category of the Baldrige Criteria:
- How do senior leaders set organizational vision and values?
- How do senior leaders deploy your organization’s vision and values?
- How do senior leaders’ personal actions reflect a commitment to the organization’s values?
“I think the most important thing is coming to a shared view about what we’re trying to accomplish—whether you’re a nonprofit or a for-profit organization,” said Mulally. “What are we? What is our real purpose?”
High-performing organizations focus through a shared vision. Creating such a vision requires leaders who will listen to employees and customers and find the common themes and interests that everyone can support. “The higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that…
16Nov2009 | Steve George | 0 comments | Continued
