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Knowledge Base Knowledge, experience and insights |
Is your job really necessary?
The contribution people make to an enterprise is the most powerful factor in its success. It creates the value that customers buy, or it can slow the whole business down because it is pulling it in different directions, or it is a simple waste of resources because what people are doing is no longer relevant.
Measuring the 'Soft Stuff'
'What gets measured gets done' is a long held maxim of management. So, because it is easier to measure things that are tangible or finite, most management time is spent on the so-called hard measures of finance and production control such as income, expenditure, volumes of outputs, costs, quality, time, inventory etc. This is all essential to good management but it is not sufficient.
Why broadcast when you really need to communicate?
A clear communications strategy supported by a well thought out and delivered communications plan is critical to any programme of change. Unfortunately most people confuse a Communications Strategy with a Broadcast Strategy.
Change Strategies - Horses for Courses
There is more than one kind of change and there is more than one kind of strategy to enable it to happen. Sometimes you need two or more strategies operating in concert. From the wide spectrum of possible change here are three different models of change that have their own characteristics and need to be handled different ways.
Resistance to change
There is a common assumption that most people will resist change, and therefore a change programme is largely about overcoming that resistance. This is not a well-founded assumption and it is likely to lead a change agent astray.
Why is Change such a big deal?
No one is powerful enough to prevent change. It is forced on us by the environment in which we operate. But we can influence it. The strategic choice facing top managers is whether they take the initiative and encourage the kind of change they see they need in the timescale they can handle, or wait and react to change initiated by others who will then have set the agenda.
Why Change Programmes fail
The stakes are enormous yet the track record of organisations dealing with large or complex change is very poor: 75% of mergers and acquisitions fail to achieve their objectives. Half actually reduce shareholder value. One third are de-merged within five years.
Bringing About
Transformation
There are three different dimensions to bringing about successful organisation transformation that have to be handled simultaneously - the intellectual, the managerial and the emotional. The emphasis is not the same in each organisation or situation, and the balance changes as the transformation progresses.
Why companies flourish
Why do some companies perform significantly better than others with broadly the same products, services, scale and business model? We have seen icons of the business scene brought low while other companies seem to thrive in the same markets and with the same risks. Research* is beginning to show us why.
Improving customer service
- a case study
Business was booming but our client was suffering from rising costs, customer dissatisfaction, poor productivity and frustrated shareholders; managers were working ever-longer hours and always in catch up mode, and good people were leaving. It appeared to them that everything was going wrong at the same time and each problem was exacerbating the others. We helped them get a grip on the problems by going back to fundamentals with them and looking at the situation afresh from the perspective of the customers. What was going wrong became clearer as did the solution.