By Michael Kanazawa 

In the January 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, two feature articles make a clear case for BIG Ideas to BIG Results and specifically the use of the ACT (Accelerated Corproate Transformation) process for driving breakthrough corporate performance.

In one article, titled “Transforming Giants”, Rosabeth Moss Kanter states, “The key, I’ve concluded, is that a decisive shift is occuring in what might be called the guidance systems of these global giants. Employees once acted mainly according to rules and decisions handed down to them, but they now draw heavily on their shared understanding of mission and on a set of tools available everywhere at once. This shift is often heralded, and in most of these companies it has been a long time coming. But now it is happening with dramatic effects.”

Our ACT process has been honed, accelerated, and streamlined for 25 years as a way for companies to focus, align, and engage entire organizaitons quickly. It becomes a system where accountabilities are strong, but at the same time provides for true engagement of the workforce. In fact, out of the 350 executive interviews Kanter and her team conducted, one person cited in the article is Sam Palmisano of IBM. Back in the 1990s when IBM made the dramatic shift to a services business model, the ACT process was used to engage the biggest part of the new IBM Global Services business unit in the transformation of IBM. The results were remarkable.

In a second feature article, Mastering the Management System, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, creators of the Balanced Score Card, point out that “Successful strategy execution has two basic rules: understand the management cycle that links strategy and operations, and know what tools to apply at each stage of the cycle. They go further in showing a sample framework of what a “Closed-Loop Management System” should look like and how to align an organizaiton around three key initiatives. Their research has produced diagrams that are remarkably similar to the tools and principles we’ve been using in transforming corporations for a long time. They suggest a broad range of tools to apply at each step as well.

Over the years, we’ve done the same thing with ACT in terms of taking the best of management tools and integrating them into a single threaded, streamlined management system. Too often, companies get stuck by bouncing between the latest management idea of the day and applying it to one part of their system. The most successful companies are able to architect a single approach that works for them and is adhered to as the winning system. Also, expanding on the concepts in the article, it is critically important to shift the leadership and ways people are engaged to make these systems work. Laying out process without changing behaviors only serves to help you more accurately track what is going wrong. If you put a system in place, sharpen the strategy and engage the organization, you will generate breakthrough results.

What are the key take-away lessons from these articles and our book?

1. Put in place a management system that will focus, align, and engage your organizaiton around translating strategy into action and it will generate breakthrough results.

2. Engage your entire orgnaization in aligning operations, financial goals, and individual behaviors around the corproate strategy and values to produce rapid and effective corporate transformations and turnarounds in performance.

3. Align all resources, people and  financial, around a narrow set of goals that are tracked regularly to drive accountability and action.

What BIG Ideas to BIG Results is adding to this discussion is the practical lessons about how to design and apply the “guidance systems” or “closed-loop management systems” into your organization. Our concepts also started in academia when Bob was chairing the Management and Organizational Effectivess program at Harvard Business School, but the critical translation of the academic concepts into real world applications has come through 25+ yeras of working side-by-side with top executives at global companies to transform their companies. In that high stress environment where speed and the need to turn around results are a constant push, we’ve really distilled the system down to the most critical elements. And now, we’re excited to share those learning with many more businesses to improve their performance.

Although our paths have been different, it was great to see such strong alignment of the keys to success. These two articles are great companion reading to our book. The articles are great overviews of the concepts and BIG Ideas to BIG Results serves as the handbook for implemention.  

Michael Kanazawa: chief executive of Dissero Partners, co-author of BIG Ideas to BIG Results
If you would like me to speak at your company or association, please contact the BrightSight Group

Note: Image from Image by Jim Frazier/Veer and the Chicago School of Business

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