Alignment
The Professional Services Journal invited Jeanne Urich, SPI Research, and I to co-lead a webinar on professional services transformations. We share background on the industry-leading PS Maturity Model Benchmark as well as our PS Transformation approach.
If you are responsible for improving performance of a professional services orgnaization or merging services organizations, you will find this webinar valuable in terms of specific benchmark performance metrics from the ”best-of-the-best” and a well proven process for transformation with some tools and case exmaples to apply to your business.
Today I met with about 50 professionals with a variety of experiences with M&A integration at the Association for Corporate Growth. The topic of my presentation was to share the true keys to success that have made the difference in companies who successfuly create shareholder value through business combinations. Several people were interested in getting a copy of the slides so I’m trying out an online publishing tool called DoXtop to easily share these.
In addition to the presentation, I’ve also included a link to a companion article to go with the presentation for those who are interested.
By Michael Kanazawa
This week I had the opportunity to meet with an amazing group of innovators at RKS Design, including Ravi Sawhny, the founder and CEO of RKS, Tom White and Deepa Prahalad. RKS designs products for companies in a very unique way. Rather than work from spec sheets, they go first to customer needs, wants and emotions. This philosophy meets closely with my perspective on customer-driven business strategy and managing to customer experiences, so I was interested in meeting them and learning more.
I didn’t keep it much of a secret that I also wanted to get my hands on one of their beautiful RKS guitars. In 2005 the RKS guitar graced the cover of BusinessWeek in an edition covering the most innovative products of the year! Holding the guitar it was clear why it won the awards and also won the hearts of people like Don Felder (The Eagles), one of my favorite guitarists of all time as well as Ricki Lee Jones, Ron Wood and many others. (more…)
Generating innovations for future growth while the economy is down, capital sources are scarce, and the markets continue to evolve quickly is a challenge facing many organizations today. Given the breadth of companies facing this challenge, I wanted to share some best practices from our experience that are practical and systemic answers to this challenge. (more…)
By: Michael Kanazawa
In most of my experiences with our ACT process, we’ve been working to accelerate strategic change at corporations. We’ve also worked with our process with public educational institutions, which has always been enjoyable because the end “product” of developing future leaders is so rewarding. One area I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about is how our process could be applied to social change or to quite literally, change the world.
Two things happened this week that are opening my eyes to the opportunity for our process to help change the world. One was an article about the breakdown between policy changes and real-world impact within our government and the other was a real surprise and practical interpretation of our work from a pet rescue non-profit founder who is looking to change the world. (more…)
By: Michael Kanazawa
Earlier this week my eBook “People Don’t Hate Change, They Hate How You’re Trying to Change Them” was posted on the Change This! site. Change This! is a site with free, downloadable essays and mini-books. It was conceived by Seth Godin and is now run by 800 CEO Read. If you haven’t been there yet, it is worth a good look.
This eBook is a great, and free, way to sample what we have to say if you haven’t read the book yet, and a fantastic way to share our message with others who would benefit from it. Anybody who is challenged with implementing a strategy or major initiative, looking to accelerate their results, and fully engage their organization would benefit from the ideas and tips. If the concepts make sense to you, please help us spread the word by forwarding or sharing the link to the eBook.
Michael Fitzgerald who writes for BNET, The New York Times and Fast Company and many other top publications calls the essay a “fun and mind-turning essay” that provides “an excellent synopsis of the book ‘Big Ideas to Big Results.’” Hope you enjoy and find value in this latest piece.
by: Michael Kanazawa
CLO Magazine’s associate editor, Lindsay Edmonds Wickman, recently wrote a piece about how to better integrate people, operations and strategic initiatives across the business, titled From Ideas to Results: The CLO’s Role. The story is based on our BIG Ideas to BIG Results process and approach. For the article, Lindsay and I talked about the fact that too often, people development is treated as a separate activity from strategic planning which is also often separate from running operations. This lack of alignment puts CLOs in a difficult position of trying to drive people initiatives that may not be viewed as integral elements of executing the strategy. There are ways to improve the alignment that are outlined in the article. The article was sent out as an Executive Briefing to CLOs and other senior HR executives, but is useful for all types of leaders and managers who want to better enable their organizations to generate big ideas and turn them into big results.
The read the full article at the CLO Magazine site, click here.
By Michael Kanazawa
When things get stressful, we often throw out phrases automatically to try and get beyond the issues for the moment without really doing what is right. But often these phrases don’t do much to help in the moment and don’t solve the true issues either. There are a few sayings that we hear in business all of the time that are about as ineffective as parents yelling at their children, “do it because I said so.” Even worse, these sayings in business cause people to make poor decisions and undermine their own leadership potential by repeating these phrases without really thinking about what they mean.
One of the most popular and most damaging of these sayings is demanding that people need to do “more with less.” (more…)
By: Michael Kanazawa
AOL’s announcement to split in two is a great decision on focus, but seems very late. When AOL started, they created the best online experience by controlling the access, content, browser, content development platforms, and commerce tools. It was an all-in-one play that allowed them to do things that others couldn’t do in a simple way for the customer. Today, all of those elements have splintered and become industries of their own and have all become easier. There is less need for a single integrated platorm. AOL’s best attributes have always been about great experiences for the end-user customer, so how can they leverage that today?
One challenge in focus is that AOL still has two big segments of customers. Older email users who started on AOL because it was easy to use and never switched to other web email services like gmail or hotmail. Then there is a second segment of young customers who got to know AOL through Instant Messenger. These two segments are going to want completely different things from AOL and somehow they will need to figure out what their hooks will be going forward. Google has played it well with broad applications like search, maps, and posting videos. AOL will need to look closely at the needs of it’s customers and find the gaps, find the things that are still difficult on the web, and create a great customer experience out of those. Media management in the home and the fight for the digital living room is still a place where competing standards, tricky technology integration issues and no single platform may provide an opportunity.
ABOUT
Michael Kanazawa shares recent insights and tips about the no-nonsense, results-driven approach to driving business breakthroughs found in his new book Big Ideas to Big Results.