|
|
|
Credit Card Charge-Off – What Does It Mean and What Should You Do About It?
Have you been told by a creditor that your debt is about to "charge-off"? Did the bill collector make it sound like you will be ruined financially if you allow this catastrophe to happen? If you're behind on your bills, unable to keep up with...
Essential Equipment For Your Home Office
Essential Equipment For Your Home Office.. Home Office Tips by BB Lee(C)2003 This is part 4 in a series of Home Business Tip Articles. You can read previous tips at: http://www.angelfire.com/zine/smallbiz. This part concerns the basic equipment...
Expect Success to Stay Self-Motivated and Get Great Results
If you called my office you will hear my voice mail message that ends with the words “Expect Success.”
There’s a important intent behind that. What if every time we made a phone call or personal request or met with a potential new customer,...
Getting the Most of your Cell Phone Batteries when Travelling
Are you planning on buying a new phone in the near future? Or do you need to replace your dead cell phone battery? When it comes to cell phone batteries, it is more complex than that of buying AA batteries. There is more than one type of cell phone...
Small Business Tax Deductions for Year End 2004
As a small business owner, it's wise to familiarize yourself with some key deductions that may reduce your tax bill for 2004.
Employee Benefit Plans - You may deduct contributions to employee benefit plans (such as health insurance plans and...
|
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Agility = Sustainability
High Engagement, it’s not your standard employee motivation. - All organizations today are faced with intense competition and rapidly changing markets, customers, products, delivery, systems and services. The rate of change is outpacing our ability to adapt. We are witnessing this inability to adapt every day as organizations in business, government, religion, healthcare etc. fail right before our eyes.
Sometimes, I think we overlook the fact that the rules of the game have changed as well. Early on in my career, businesses were evaluated by the amount of assets or “Retained Earnings” showing on their books. “Good Will,” used to be a bone of contention in determining the real value of an organization. Today, little if any attention is paid to “Retained Earnings” as we have switched to measuring “Return on Investment” and other measures of efficient use of capital. In part, efficiency has become the key instead of asset accumulation because a product and process that is generating a profit today may be tomorrow’s buggy whip. Change in our environment and change in the rules we are measured by all point to the need to be adept at change.
To me, an agile organization is one that is proficient at change. It can do anything it wants, whenever it wants. There have been lots of different operating strategies presented over the last few years to help us transform our organizations to higher levels of performance. These strategies include, LEAN, TQM, Continuous Improvement, SMED, Process Reengineering, Mass Customization and others. Sadly many of the efforts to implement these strategies have failed not because the strategy was wrong, but rather because agility was missing in the organization. Agility is a people issue not a strategy or process issue. Successful adoption of operating and transformational strategies will happen much faster and with less expense as an organization becomes more agile.
Like evolution and mutation in living organisms, organizational adaptability or agility is a core survival requirement. Achieving agility in an organization is contrary to the way most of us were trained to manage. Most management training even today is still based on the work of Frederick Taylor. It is an approach to management that worked well at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but is sadly out of date in today’s highly sophisticated world where computers, cell phones, the internet, radio and television are commonplace and workers are better educated and more involved in their world than ever before.
As I witness the changes in organizations, I become more convinced daily that all of the process improvements in the world will not by themselves solve the problems facing organizations. It is time for a new approach to management that involves people in the issues that affect them leading to engagement, creativity and commitment in the workplace. Jack Stack in his book The Great Game of Business makes the case when he says, “…productivity depends on people. I don’t disagree that machines can make you more competitive. They can absorb overhead. They don’t take breaks. They don’t go on vacation. They don’t sit around wasting time. What machines can’t do is figure out how to make money. Only people can do that. If you have people who know how to make money, you’ll win
every time.”
For too long, we have relied on a leader – who by virtue of position, greater experience, wisdom or skill, is relied upon as the problem solver and that leader fails to ask for or accept input from team members. Psychologist Patrick Laughlin and his colleagues at the University of Illinois recently released a new study that shows that the approaches and outcomes of cooperating groups are not just better than those of the average group member, but are better than even the group’s best problem solver functioning alone.
Not only do groups make better decisions, but once agreed to, the decisions are far easier to implement and have much greater likelihood of success. More and more research points to the advantages of group engagement and decision-making. It is no longer a matter of why you should adopt a high engagement strategy with your people to gain agility, but rather how to implement this process.
Roadway is a trucking company that is currently implementing a high engagement strategy in their organization with some tremendous successes. Their approach includes three elements and may very well be the model for other organizations. The three elements of their program are: 1.) Education, 2.) Tools, 3.) High Engagement.
First, Roadway is spending a lot of time educating their people about the business. They have adopted much of the thinking from Jack Stack’s book, “The Great Game of Business.” The key is to help their employees understand the financials of the business and how they affect the numbers. Second, they have trained their people in the basic principles of LEAN so that they can evaluate current processes and procedures and have a basis for making changes that will positively affect the bottom line. Finally, they have adopted and use a positive approach to achieving “High Engagement.” Rather than focusing on the problems in the company, they have chosen to look at the strengths of the company and build on those strengths using David Coopperrider’s 4D model for positive change.
The results at Roadway have been impressive. There are many stories of success at individual terminals that are now being shared across the company and in the meantime just one of the measures they use has recorded a $10 million improvement over the last 4 years. Roadway is rapidly developing Agility to help them face a very competitive and rapidly changing world. Without it, they would most likely not have survived.
ã Copyright Bob Cannon/The Cannon Advantage, 2003. All rights reserved.
Byline
Bob Cannon helps visionary leaders make decisions that gain a competitive advantaget. Check out other interesting articles available in the Taking Aim newsletter available at www.cannonadvantage.com . Bob can be reached at (216) 408-9495 or mailto: bob@cannonadvantage.com
This article courtesy of http://www.cannonadvantage.com. You may freely reprint this article on your website or in your newsletter provided this courtesy notice and the author name and URL remain intact.
About the Author
Robert E. Cannon, successful business executive, left the corporate world in 2001 to start Cannon Advantage; a firm specializing in helping visionary leaders and business decision-makers who want to enhance the competitive advantage of their organizations
|
|
|
|
|
| Compare Cell Phones & Service - Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile ... |
| Research, compare, and buy cellular phones and services. |
| www.letstalk.com |
|
| Free T-Mobile Cell Phones and Other Wireless Deals |
| Save on T-Mobile cell phones and plans. Compare deals to TMobile.com. 1-year T-Mobile plans available with popular phones. Or pick another wireless carrier. |
| www.a1wireless.com |
|
| mobilecellphone.com |
| www.mobilecellphone.com/ - 2k - Cached - Similar pages |
|
|
| Mobile Cell Phone Rental in Japan :: RentafoneJapan |
| This page contains information on mobile cell phone rental in Japan and Korea - Japanese, Korea, and International GSM mobile cellular phone and mobile ... |
| www.japanvisitor.com |
|
| Communications - Mobile-Cell-Phone Ezine Articles |
| EzineArticles.com allows ezine or email list publishers to upload or download free expert content that can be used within email newsletters or websites. |
| ezinearticles.com |
|
| Cell Phones and Service from Virgin Mobile |
| Cellular Phones and Service from Virgin Mobile. Ringtones & downloads for your mobile phones, as well as cell phone accessories, prepaid cell phones, ... |
| www.virginmobileusa.com |
|
| Mobile / Cell Phone Is Linked To Cancer, you need protection from ... |
| Test your exposure levels to mobile / cell phone radiation and check if it's safe to carry a mobile phone! |
| www.radar3.com |
|
| Repair4MobilePhone: Do-It-Yourself Mobile (Cellular) Phone ... |
| Repair4MobilePhone: Do-It-Yourself Mobile (Cell) Phone Upgrading, Modding and Repairing · site map · search · Mobile (Cell) Phones | IrDA | BlueTooth ... |
| repair4mobilephone.org |
|
| YouTube - New Apple iChat Mobile Cell phone |
| New Apple iChat Mobile Cell phone 00:25. From: foxymcfox Views: 90457. << Now Playing ... New Apple iChat Mobile Cell phone *FAKE* 00:33. From: foxymcfox ... |
| www.youtube.com |
|
| YouTube - New Apple iChat Mobile Cell phone *FAKE* |
| ... turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player. Get the latest flash player. This is a video response to New Apple iChat Mobile Cell phone ... |
| www.youtube.com |
|
| Java Mobile Cell Phone Games - A220 Mission 1 |
| An arcade style shoot em up game , Java Midlet for your Mobile / Cell Phone. Fly through mountains and cave systems eliminating multiple enemies before ... |
| www.jpowered.com |
|
| Java Mobile Cell Phone Games - Alien War |
| Alien War is an arcade style game , Java Midlet for your Mobile / Cell Phone. JPowered is a leading provider of Java Mobile Cell Phone Games. |
| www.jpowered.com |
|
| Communications - Mobile Cell Phone |
| Mobile Cell Phone Tips. Broadband-Internet, GPS, Mobile-Cell-Phone, Telecommunications, Satellite-TV, Satellite-Radio, VOIP, Video-Conferencing » View ... |
| communications.smartads.info |
|
| Free mobile, cell phone and text news alerts - Philadelphia ... |
| Set up free mobile, cell phone alerts to stay connected with the news. Receive text message alerts when news happens on the WCAU Philadelphia, PA website. |
| www.nbc10.com |
|
| Buying a Virgin Mobile Cell Phone? Want $10 free airtime? |
| I have some Kickback codes that I will e-mail you if you want that will give you $10 Extra in airtime when you activate your Virgin Mobile Cell phone. ... |
| www.topix.net |
|
| Skype from Mobile Cell Phone |
| Skype from Mobile Cell Phone,cell phone,cellular,mobile phone,skype,Skype as we already know is one of the most popular VoIP applications. |
| blog.tmcnet.com |
|
| Yahoo! Answers - can you use a t-mobile cell phone with verizon ... |
| 3 answers - i want to get a t-mobile phone and use m verizon sim card. is that possible? if not can i use the t-mobile phone with a verizon plan? |
| answers.yahoo.com |
|
| Compare Prices on Samsung X210 Mobile Cell Phone - ShopFerret ... |
| Use ShopFerret to find the best stores and lowest prices for the Samsung X210 Mobile Cell Phone. |
| www.shopferret.com.au |
|
| eBay: Custom Mobile Cell Phone Pay Per Click Website +Adsense ... |
| Find Custom Mobile Cell Phone Pay Per Click Website +Adsense in the Business Industrial , Other Industries , Websites Businesses for Sale , Internet ... |
| cgi.ebay.com |
|
| Tmobile |
| Review Cell Phone: pad Samsung Trace T519 T-Mobile Cell Phone ... Paper Thin T-Mobile Cell Phone with 1.3 meagpizel camera and MP3 Player. ... |
| www.1800mobiles.com |
|
|