January 1, 2010

Employee Development Systems, Inc.
The Personal Accountability Company

7308 South Alton Way, Suite 2J
Dry Creek Business Park
Centennial, Colorado 80112 

Phone: 1-800.282.3374  

employeedevelopmentsystems.com 

info@edsiusa.com 


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Doing What Matters, by James Kilts (Three Rivers Press, 2010), is an update of the frank talking and insightful original, released in 2007. Kilts is one of the most successful CEOs of our times.  His resume includes Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft, amongst others. 

 

This first person account takes the reader through the system that Kilts has used time and again for identifying and tackling what is important and ignoring the rest of the information that you are faced with. 

 

Kilts addresses both the business fundamentals and personal attributes that have lead to his success, such as intellectual integrity, taking action, generating enthusiasm and understanding the right things. 

 

Start 2010 right by downloading the 2010 Trainer’s Resolution Toolkit from ASTD.  It’s free.

 

Is your career on the right path?  Are you strategizing or just "feeling your way?"  Truth be told, many people are in the latter category, never really knowing if their career is taking the right direction. 

 

If you haven't made any New Year's resolutions yet, make this one now: Start to treat your career proactively instead of reactively.  It is a simple statement, but can make all the difference for your career.

 

Growth is fundamental and inevitable.  No matter what goals you strive for, or what you would like to see changed in the future, growth is at the center of any change.  There are people all around us who can act as poor examples for growth; they seem to have stagnated, and are on a permanent path based on reaction to circumstances.

 

What can you do to proactively jumpstart your career plans? 

 

First, always make your future bigger than your past.  The past is useful for drawing upon your experiences for learning and wisdom.  Think of your past as raw material for creating an even bigger future.  If you use your past to keep creating a bigger future, you will separate yourself from situations and relationships that can trap your thought process in a loop--keeping you stagnant. 

 

Next, concentrate on the learning, not the experience. Every experience has things that worked and things that didn't work. Once you sift through your experiences to determine which parts fall into each category, you can look at ways to maximize what worked and bypass or eliminate what didn't. Remember: You don't get to choose experiences you have, but you DO get to choose what to do with them.

 

One of the critical issues that leaders face is not necessarily creating a strategy, but actually executing it to throughout the ranks of the organization. 

 

Execution is a set of linked activities that carry out the critical changes and development efforts that you have worked so hard to create. 

 

Since leaders are trained more in planning than they are in execution; they tend to be more comfortable with strategy creation than implementation. Let's take a moment to look at the next step - turning planning into doing.

 

The most successful strategic outcomes are best achieved when the "rank and file" is also part of the planning and formulation process.  We have all read about how critical "buy-in" is, and that adage still rings true.  The greater the overlap between the doers and the planners, the more success you will have. 

 

What else can you do to ensure success?  Managers must take execution into account while they are formulating plans.  In other words, execution is not an afterthought. All execution decisions cannot be taken at once.  However, the formulation and execution overlap is critical to carrying out your plans.

  

Think of execution as a process versus a single decision or action.  As Lawrence Hrebiniak, author of Making Strategy Work (Wharton School Publishing, 2005) states, "Execution isn't the result of a single decision or action. It's the result of a series of integrated decisions or actions over time."

 

In addition to being played out over longer periods of time, strategy implementation always involves more people than strategy formulation. That presents additional problems. Communication down the organization or across functions becomes a challenge.  So what can you do to make the execution process as smooth and successful as possible?

 

1. Develop a logical model that works for you and your company.

 

2. Keep the overlap between strategy and execution at the forefront at every stage.

 

3. Foster information sharing, coordination and clear accountability.

 

4.  Develop a culture that supports a robust execution process. 

 

In our author interview this time, we caught up with Guy Greco, co-author of Mastering Strategy (McGraw-Hill), a leading edge book that examines best practices from the world's most successful companies, CEOs and academics, and details how executives can benchmark these business practices to overcome new questions and problems in today's harder-faster-smarter world.

 

 

The intent behind the book was to follow the model of our QuadStrat assessment, which is like an MRI for an organization.  We worked with academic advisors at Pepperdine and UCLA to develop the assessment content, and the book, published by McGraw-Hill, was a natural addition. The book covers the three core drivers of an organization: 

 

Strategy, which consists of business concerns such as customers, competition, finance, marketing, sales, and execution.  

 

Next is Design, which looks at the infrastructure of an organization, such as roles and responsibilities, policies and procedures, technology, and other factors that employees need to negotiate, in order to do their jobs and contribute to the successful execution of the company’s strategy.

  

Lastly, we looked at Culture, which includes all of the people issues, such as corporate values, leadership, performance management, and feedback, amongst other areas. 

  

 

The book walks through each of these areas and shows examples of companies that have really mastered them, such as organizations that have a great brand in marketing, like Nike or superior recruitment disciplines like Disney or Southwest Airlines. 

  

The question we asked ourselves was, "Shouldn’t companies who adopt these best practices have a better bottom line?"  We wanted to find out if successful organizations embrace these best practices more than other companies, and, secondly, if those practices lead to better than average profits. We used our QuadStrat Assessment to accomplish this study.

 

 

The results show that companies who followed more of these best practices, and thus had better run operations, consistently outperformed other organizations.  That is why the book is so useful; anyone can augment their current business knowledgebase with real world exemplary cases.

 

 

The book is useful for multiple audiences.  Most of us began our careers in the corporate world.  I came up through organizational development and human resources. My business partner came up through operations, finance, marketing, and sales. 

 

If we have thoughts on pursuing higher management, we tend to wonder: How will I do if I have my sites on being in the higher levels; will I have what it takes?  This book can serve as a primer for people who are moving up through the organization, as well as those who are already executives.  The book fills in the learning gaps for all key business disciplines.

 

It seems that no workplace is completely immune to the ill effects of gossip.  Our situation this time is no different.  Christine has not ever gotten along with her boss, and feels confident that she is smarter and more competent than him.  When given the chance to work off-site at an industry conference, she was excited to get the ear of her boss's immediate superior. 

 

Taking charge of this opportunity, she gave him a complete description of all that had gone wrong due to her boss's actions, starting with the facts, and injecting her outrage as she continued.  You are the superior in whom she confided.