Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little


Book Description

A liberating look at the real reasons organization-wide improvement efforts fail and how, when all attempts have failed, you can help your organization to become great. As the authors of this eye-opening new work make clear, to enact real change, organizations need to shake off their immaturity and grow up. Shifting away from the tendency to lay all the blame on bad leadership, Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little: Overcoming Organizational Immaturity offers specific answers for why most organizational improvement efforts fail. Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little explains the difficulties and dangers of organizational immaturity, then provides proven, effective tools and ideas for achieving change within the limitations of an immature organization. With this guide, leaders and other stakeholders will be able to determine the maturity level of an organization, get beyond prevailing myths about how change gets derailed, and identify potential areas for improvement.




Leading Change


Book Description

From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.




Tempered Radicals


Book Description

This text explores the experiences of tempered radicals. These are people who want to become valued and successful members of their organisations without selling out on who they are and what they believe in.




Execution


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than two million copies in print! The premier resource for how to deliver results in an uncertain world, whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job. “A must-read for anyone who cares about business.”—The New York Times When Execution was first published, it changed the way we did our jobs by focusing on the critical importance of “the discipline of execution”: the ability to make the final leap to success by actually getting things done. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan now reframe their empowering message for a world in which the old rules have been shattered, radical change is becoming routine, and the ability to execute is more important than ever. Now and for the foreseeable future: • Growth will be slower. But the company that executes well will have the confidence, speed, and resources to move fast as new opportunities emerge. • Competition will be fiercer, with companies searching for any possible advantage in every area from products and technologies to location and management. • Governments will take on new roles in their national economies, some as partners to business, others imposing constraints. Companies that execute well will be more attractive to government entities as partners and suppliers and better prepared to adapt to a new wave of regulation. • Risk management will become a top priority for every leader. Execution gives you an edge in detecting new internal and external threats and in weathering crises that can never be fully predicted. Execution shows how to link together people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of every business. Leading these processes is the real job of running a business, not formulating a “vision” and leaving the work of carrying it out to others. Bossidy and Charan show the importance of being deeply and passionately engaged in an organization and why robust dialogues about people, strategy, and operations result in a business based on intellectual honesty and realism. With paradigmatic case histories from the real world—including examples like the diverging paths taken by Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase and Charles Prince at Citigroup—Execution provides the realistic and hard-nosed approach to business success that could come only from authors as accomplished and insightful as Bossidy and Charan.




Printing Trade News


Book Description




Metrics


Book Description

Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn’t it be great to have a simple explanation of how to collect, analyze, report, and use measurements to improve your organization? Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does the book explain the “why” of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process for creating a report card that provides a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way—the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. The report card provides a simple tool for viewing the health of your organization, from the outside in. You will learn how to measure the key components of the report card and thereby improve real measures of business success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising. This book: Provides a step-by-step guide for building an organizational effectiveness report card Takes you from identifying key services and products and using metrics, to determining business strategy Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise, including IT




A Little Life


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A stunning “portrait of the enduring grace of friendship” (NPR) about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. A masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century. NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • MAN BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST • WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE A Little Life follows four college classmates—broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition—as they move to New York in search of fame and fortune. While their relationships, which are tinged by addiction, success, and pride, deepen over the decades, the men are held together by their devotion to the brilliant, enigmatic Jude, a man scarred by an unspeakable childhood trauma. A hymn to brotherly bonds and a masterful depiction of love in the twenty-first century, Hanya Yanagihara’s stunning novel is about the families we are born into, and those that we make for ourselves. Look for Hanya Yanagihara’s latest bestselling novel, To Paradise.




Success Metrics


Book Description

Learn how to measure success at the individual and organizational levels. By measuring success in multiple dimensions using multivariate methods you will be able to determine what works and what doesn’t. The key is to measure and promote progress in terms of organizational vision, mission, and overarching goals. Business leaders too often succumb to the working assumption that they only have to show shareholders and boards of trustees that they are turning a profit—the higher the profit, the more successful their stewardship of the company. Wrong! To truly thrive and endure, all organizations—corporate, government, small, large, nonprofit, or startup—need to define and pursue the underlying purpose for their existence. To measure success, leaders today are missing a key meta-analytic in their toolbox. In this book, metrics consultant Martin Klubeck provides it to them. Success Metrics steps you through the process of identifying and combining the right measures to gauge, narrate, and guide your organization's progress toward true success. All organizations have a common goal to be successful. All leaders want to make data-informed decisions and use measures to improve processes, communicate progress, and gain support. The problem is that proxy or partial measures don’t measure overall success and can be misleading. They measure performance parameters, progress on a specific task, customer feedback, and other piecemeal indices—which taken separately fail to describe an organization’s progress toward overall success. The author's integrated measures of success can be used to communicate organizational progress to stakeholders, shareholders, boards of trustees, corporate leaders, the workforce, and the customer base and thereby galvanize broad commitment to organizational success. Klubeck shows how his principles and methods of measuring overall success can be applied at all levels: individual, team, group, department, division, and organization. What You Will Learn: Understand why you should measure success instead of performance Understand what to measure and what not to measure Integrate the measures of success to tell a complete story Share measures of success with different audiences Who This Book Is For Organizational leaders at all levels from the executive suite to middle management, analysts and consultants who are tasked with designing metrics programs for organizations, individuals interested in adapting the author's framework to measure overall personal success in multiple dimensions




Continuous Process Improvement in Organizations Large and Small


Book Description

Our world changes faster today than at any time in the history of mankind. Organizations, like living breathing organisms, must learn to adapt to changes in the environment in which each operates. It is generally held today, by those who study organizations, that those who fail to adapt to seemingly unending change are certainly doomed but those able to adapt to constant change tend to thrive. The purpose of this book is to describe the leadership required to successfully implement continuous process improvement in organizations. The author begins the journey with a discussion of organizational culture as he sets out to describe how leaders develop a culture where continuous improvement can thrive. The challenges of organizational change faced by all leaders who strive to take advantage of the benefits of continuous process improvement is discussed, as well as what leaders must do to make change stick. The goal is to provide a description of the leadership necessary to make continuous process improvement a reality in any organization.




Fit to Compete


Book Description

Is Silence Killing Your Strategy? In his thirty years of working in corporations, Harvard Business School professor Michael Beer has witnessed firsthand how organizational silence derails strategic objectives. When employees can't speak truth to power, senior leaders don't hear what they need to hear about their company's fitness to compete, and employees lose trust in those leaders and become less committed to change. In Fit to Compete, Beer presents an antidote to silence--principles and a time-tested innovative process for holding honest conversations with everyone in your organization. Used by over eight hundred organizations across the globe, the strategic fitness process has helped leaders in a diverse range of industries--including medical technology, information technology, banking, restaurant chains, and pharmaceuticals--hear the raw but necessary truth about the sources of misalignment between their strategies and their organizations. In addition to step-by-step instructions, Beer offers detailed and illustrative case studies of companies that have conducted honest conversations to great effect. He also shows how to apply the process more broadly to a variety of strategic challenges and at multiple levels throughout the organization. Practical, enlightening, and comprehensive, Fit to Compete is the book you should turn to if you to want create winning strategies that your entire company will rally behind.