Tag Archives: operations

Introducing Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World as an interactive digital workbook.

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 titled Manage 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.

Announcing: Manage to Lead — Seven Truths to Help You Change the World

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.

Peter DiGiammarino will present a one-hour summary of his Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World framework, that can be used to describe and assess any organization, at the Northern Virginia Society for Human Resource Managers dinner meeting on April 30.

He will also provide a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance. Continue reading Announcing: Manage to Lead — Seven Truths to Help You Change the World

Four questions an organization needs to ask every performance period in order to perform, learn, and grow to its full potential.

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.

Continue reading Four questions an organization needs to ask every performance period in order to perform, learn, and grow to its full potential.

Why it is important to get off of auto-pilot and how to do it.

Most people find it is hard to connect all nine dots in the figure at left with four straight lines, without retracing any lines, and without lifting their writing implement.

The reason it is hard to do is because in order to solve the puzzle a person has to think and operate in ways that are different than normal; or outside the box, as they say.

Before reading further, follow the instructions to solve the puzzle yourself; first with four lines, and then try to solve it using only three lines.  Finally, try to determine how many ways the puzzle can be solved with Continue reading Why it is important to get off of auto-pilot and how to do it.

How to get, and stay, in control of operations.

Leaders who are in control of operations compare their organization’s actual performance results to:

  • Past results to know whether their organization is trending up, down or sideways.
  • The results other organizations that are doing things similar to theirs achieve in order to know how well they are doing relative to industry benchmarks, especially relative to those who do best what they are doing.
  • Plan, budget, projection, or forecast in order to hold themselves accountable to what they said would happen.
  • Target or goal to know if it is time to be done with what they are doing!
The exhibit below provides precise definitions of terms leaders can use to talk about their organization’s performance with their leadership team and organization stakeholders.