A qualified sales prospect may turn out to be in the next seat at a conference session or happen by the booth in the vendor display area … but the odds are so long that if the only plan is to meet people randomly then it is probably not worth going.
The value of attending is multiplied many times when an industry conference serves as a platform to work from before, during and after by a team committed to making the most of the experience.
Specifically, contact targeted executives regarding the conference. Every interaction is a chance to make a strong personal connection around a topic of mutual interest (the conference); use it to gather intelligence and to impact thinking related to cultivating interest in organization offerings. Continue reading Don’t go to the conference stupid!→
Leaders often struggle to reach a good, a better, or even a best solution to countless such questions. More important than the right answer, though, is all team members having the sameanswer.
Many intelliven.com blog posts are based on the slides and lecture notes from a masters class in Organization Development called Organization Analysis and Strategy offered at American University and taught by Peter DiGiammarino. These posts and other material from class, including:
Work problems,
Templates,
Graphics,
Slide shows, and
Assessments
are available from Amazon as a softcover workbook or from iTunes as an iBook titledManage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World.
Selected intelliven.com blog content is now available as a workbook from Amazon or as an iBook from iTunes.
Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.
Manage to Lead presents a framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.
Readers are invited to select a familiar organization on which to apply the tools and templates introduced throughout the workbook. Exercises in each chapter produce essential elements for the organization’s annual strategic plan and lay the groundwork for implementing that plan.
Readers can package the key elements from Organization Exercises to form a strategic plan that communicates how the organization sees itself and where it is headed. At the end of the year leaders can compare actual results with what was described in the strategic plan to study what happened, why what happened was different than plan, what is to be learned from that, and what to do differently going forward as a result.
Repeat the process over several years and compare actual to planned results year-to-year to see the organization mature, perform, and grow to its full potential.
If the leader thinks s/he knows what needs to change and that everyone is aligned, ask: “How do you know your team knows what you want to do; why don’t we ask them just to verify? If they all say what you expect them to say, a positive step towards getting what you want done will have been taken just by bringing it to the center of their attention. If it turns out that some or all of the team are not as aligned as expected, then remedial steps can be taken.”
Survey the leader’s top team and ask them each:
To describe the current state, that is: how things are today.
What really good things happen if we change and what really bad things happen if we do not?
To describe how things would be in the future if their ideal changes were successfully implemented.
What needs to be done in order to get from where things are today to where things would ideally be next?
What will make it hard to do what needs to be done in order to get from today to the targeted next state?
It is impossible to control what you cannot, and what you do not, measure. For every important thing that the organization does, decide what is most important to monitor and then watch carefully to know how things are going.
If what to monitor is not known then:
Watch everything and whittle away what turns out to not be useful and keep watching what turns out to be useful.
Study similar organizations to learn what they track.
Look up industry analysts and market researchers to find out what they watch.
A qualified sales prospect may turn out to be in the next seat at a conference session or happen by the booth in the vendor display area … but the odds are so long that if the only plan is to meet people randomly then it is probably not worth going.
