Posts Tagged ‘transformation’
Last month I delivered a keynote speech to a group of business leaders in Athens, Greece. The HMA had adopted the concept of replacing the old concept of trying to do “more with less” with the concept from our book, “doing more ON less.” I loved the signage for the event. The concept of “more with less” is completely overused and in crisis situations just results in lots of under-funded activities, diffused leadership attention and gridlock of any progress. Doing “More ON Less” is about reducing the focus to the highest impact activities, concentrating funding on those items and focusing leadership attention on just a big initiatives. Here is how the idea of transforming through “More ON Less” could be applied in Greece today. (more…)
In our strategic transformation work we are often asked the question, “why should we limit ourselves to just three major initiatives?” Executive teams feel that a short list of initiatives is not a stretch for the organization or that it is too limited to create transformational change. The truth is that when it comes to execution, transformational change comes from making major progress on a small number of things. It is about stacking up the resources on the most high impact initiatives that will have meaningful impact on customer value and the customer experience.
Harvard Business Review just published research from Booz Allen & Company that was based on a broad executive study of 1800 global executives. Here are some of the highlights for you to consider and to use with your stakeholders and team to make the case for focus.
* Most executives (64%) report they have too many conflicting priorities.
* The majority of executives (56%) say that allocating resources in a way that really supports the strategy is a significant challenge, especially as companies chase a wide set of growth initiatives.
* 81% admit that their growth initiatives lead to waste, at least some of the time.
* Nearly half (47%) say their company’s way of creating value is not well understood by employees or customers. (more…)
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.
This month we published, with SPI Research, a white paper focused on how to successfully transform professional services organizations (PSOs). PSOs have an ability to rapidly scale and drive greater profitability if you have the right focus and ability to transform smoothly. Since PSOs are people-driven businesses, they have an ability to change very rapidly, but also are at the greatest risk in hitting roadblocks to change as well.
The white paper points out the specific reason why PSO transformations typically fail to reach their desired results due to the use of under-scoped and limited tools of change management and business process re-engineering solutions alone. A complete framework for transformation and a streamlined and proven transformation process are described. The paper also shares some breakthough statistics from the 2009 Professional Services Maturity Model that clearly tie leadership and strategic focus to greater profitability and overall performance.
For a copy of the white paper - click here.
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.