Simons presents the seven key questions a manager and his team must continually ask. Drawing on decades of research into performance management systems and organization design, "Seven Strategy Questions" is a no-nonsense, must-read resource for all leaders in any organization.
To stay ahead of the pack, you must translate your organization's competitive strategy into the day-to-day actions carried out in your company. That means channeling resources into the right efforts, achieving the right balance between innovation and control, and getting everyone pulling in the same direction. How to keep all this on track? Identify critical gaps in your strategy execution processes, focus on the most important choices you must make, and understand what's at stake in each one. In this concise guide, Harvard Business School professor Robert Simons presents the seven key questions you and your team must continually ask, beginning now. These questions--including "Who is our primary customer?" "What critical performance variables are we tracking?" and "What strategic uncertainties are keeping us awake at night?"--force you to reexamine the emerging data and unspoken assumptions underlying your strategy and how it's implemented through your business processes and structures. Simons's extensive examples then help you understand your options and position you to make the tough choices needed to excel at execution. Drawing on decades of research into performance management systems and organization design, Seven Strategy Questions is a no-nonsense, must-read resource for all leaders in your organization.
Get in Gear: The Seven Gears that Drive Strategy to Results (978-0-367-47149-1, 335422) Shelving Guide: Business and Management/Leadership/Strategy Only 10% to 25% of organizations get it right when it comes to achieving the expected results from their strategic planning. This means 75% to 90% of them are leaving results on the table and wasting their time on things that don’t matter. Almost a decade ago, a major steel manufacturer approached Sean Ryan and his team to help them think through how to better convert strategy to results. This was the catalyst for the seven gears that translate strategy to results found in Strategy-Execution-Results (SXRTM). Why Gears? Gears transmit energy. The more aligned they are and the less friction in their chain, the better they function. Leaders can easily identify the gear creating the most friction and then take action to better align that gear with the strategy generating better results. This creates momentum to improve the alignment and performance of other gears. This approach also emphasizes the ways everyone in the organization has some influence over every gear. Based on Sean Ryan’s consulting and training with organizations from start-ups to the Fortune 100, he’s found that these performance gears drive better results. You’ll employ them to align your goals with your strategy, create visible scorecards to know whether or not you’re on track, and identify the critical behaviors and actions that will drive performance. Readers will use this book to point their efforts toward getting meaningful results from their strategy. As noted in the Harvard Business Review: "The prize for closing the strategy-performance gap is huge: increasing performance by at least 50% for most organizations." After moving beyond their initial amazement of just how misaligned they were, they’ll be able to quickly apply the seven gears to sell better and more, drive down costs, improve quality and safety, and recruit talent for the future. In addition, there’s nothing in this book that has not been applied in actual business settings. While companies could use the SXRTM Framework to overhaul their organization top to bottom, they’ll also appreciate that they don’t have to change everything at once to make progress. Upon understanding each of the gears and how to create Follow-up and Follow-through, they’ll be able to improve any gear to start seeing strategic outcomes. You’ve got it in Gear, now Stay in Gear. Join the Strategy-Execution-Results Community: www.wwici.com/Gearheads.
The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap is the must-have resource for digital marketing agency owners. Increase your income, work when and how you want, get your clients get incredible results...... and live your desired lifestyle. The Seven Figure Agency is designed to solve these issues you may be experiencing such as: * Too many agencies hit an income ceiling, and never make the kind of money (or the kind of impact) that they are capable of. They get stuck at one of the 3 plateaus: Startup, Struggle or even Success * Most agencies blame themselves, and try to work on their MINDSET -- But nothing changes because it's not your mindset that's the problem. It's the MODEL that needs to change. * The model that you bought into when you started your agency business is completely unscalable (Manual prospecting to get a few leads, chasing prospects down rather than getting them to come to you... and living off of project revenue so there's never consistent income or time for you). * For the last 5 years, the author has been working with a select group of agencies, taking them from Struggle to Success, Scale and Significance. Josh Nelson has a very new approach and he shares the very best of what is working in his business & for the agencies he works with to build million dollar agencies. This book is essential reading for agencies of all types and experience-levels and is of particular value for anyone looking to start a digital marketing agency to short cut growing pains and accelerate their growth to Seven Figures & Beyond.Forget the old concept of a general, digital marketing agency that takes years to establish - there's no need to wait when you have The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap. Whether your dream is to control your schedule or earn six figures in a month, The Seven Figure Agency Roadmap is your manual.This set of turn-by-turn directions to building a digital agency teaches: * How Josh went from virtually bankrupt to running a hypergrowth agency that made the Inc 5000 list of fastest growing companies in the Untied States 4 years in a row * How to build the team that will manage the day-to-day operations * How top agency owners grow to seven figures within a year * How to add $5,000 in monthly recurring revenue to your agency every single month * How to rapidly establish authority in any niche, so clients ask to work with you When you purchase the book you get access to a workbook that help you put the ideas into action: * Multiple case studies & long form interviews with members of Seven Figure Agency Coaching who have grown their revenue to seven figures, hired teams to replace themselves, or sold their agencies for a nice profit * Josh's templates you can copy for setting goals, designing your marketing, and tracking performance * How the Seven Figure Agency principles create a life shaped to your goals
The design of an organization--the accountability system that defines roles, rights, and responsibilities throughout the firm--has a direct impact on the performance of every employee. Yet, few leaders devote focused attention to how this design is chosen, implemented, and adjusted over time. Robert Simons argues that by viewing design as a powerful and proactive management lever--rather than an inevitable outcome of corporate evolution--leaders can maximize productivity across every level of the organization. Levers of Organization Design presents a new design theory based on four key yet often underrated categories: customer definition, critical performance variables, creative tension, and commitment to mission. Building from these core areas, Simons lays out a step-by-step process leaders can follow to create structures and accountability systems that positively influence how people do their work, where they focus their attention, and how their activities can be aligned to contribute to overall strategic goals. He also introduces four levers of organizational design--unit configuration, diagnostic control systems, interactive networks, and responsibility to others--that leaders can manipulate to improve overall organizational efficiency and effectiveness vastly. For anyone accountable for measuring and managing performance, this book shows how good design can become an organization's roadmap to success. Robert Simons is the Charles M. Williams Professor of Business Administration in the accounting & control area at Harvard Business School.
Explains how companies must pinpoint business strategies to a few critically important choices, identifying common blunders while outlining simple exercises and questions that can guide day-to-day and long-term decisions.
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • More than two million copies in print! The premier resource for how to deliver results in an uncertain world, whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job. “A must-read for anyone who cares about business.”—The New York Times When Execution was first published, it changed the way we did our jobs by focusing on the critical importance of “the discipline of execution”: the ability to make the final leap to success by actually getting things done. Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan now reframe their empowering message for a world in which the old rules have been shattered, radical change is becoming routine, and the ability to execute is more important than ever. Now and for the foreseeable future: • Growth will be slower. But the company that executes well will have the confidence, speed, and resources to move fast as new opportunities emerge. • Competition will be fiercer, with companies searching for any possible advantage in every area from products and technologies to location and management. • Governments will take on new roles in their national economies, some as partners to business, others imposing constraints. Companies that execute well will be more attractive to government entities as partners and suppliers and better prepared to adapt to a new wave of regulation. • Risk management will become a top priority for every leader. Execution gives you an edge in detecting new internal and external threats and in weathering crises that can never be fully predicted. Execution shows how to link together people, strategy, and operations, the three core processes of every business. Leading these processes is the real job of running a business, not formulating a “vision” and leaving the work of carrying it out to others. Bossidy and Charan show the importance of being deeply and passionately engaged in an organization and why robust dialogues about people, strategy, and operations result in a business based on intellectual honesty and realism. With paradigmatic case histories from the real world—including examples like the diverging paths taken by Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase and Charles Prince at Citigroup—Execution provides the realistic and hard-nosed approach to business success that could come only from authors as accomplished and insightful as Bossidy and Charan.
Good Strategy/Bad Strategy clarifies the muddled thinking underlying too many strategies and provides a clear way to create and implement a powerful action-oriented strategy for the real world. Developing and implementing a strategy is the central task of a leader. A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for—overcoming the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect. Yet, Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” In Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, he debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” He introduces nine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—that are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can easily be put to work on Monday morning, and uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.
How smart companies are opening up strategic initiatives to involve front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Why are some of the world’s most successful companies able to stay ahead of disruption, adopting and implementing innovative strategies, while others struggle? It’s not because they hire a new CEO or expensive consultants but rather because these pioneering companies have adopted a new way of strategizing. Instead of keeping strategic deliberations within the C-Suite, they open up strategic initiatives to a diverse group of stakeholders—front-line employees, experts, suppliers, customers, entrepreneurs, and even competitors. Open Strategy presents a new philosophy, key tools, step-by-step advice, and fascinating case studies—from companies that range from Barclays to Adidas—to guide business leaders in this groundbreaking approach to strategy. The authors—business-strategy experts from both academia and management consulting—introduce tools for each of the three stages of strategy-making: idea generation, plan formulation, and implementation. These are digital tools (including strategy contests), which allow the widest participation; hybrid digital/in-person tools (including a “nightmare competitor challenge”); a workshop tool that gamifies the business model development process; and tools that help companies implement and sustain open strategy efforts. Open strategy has an astonishing track record: a survey of 200 business leaders shows that although open-strategy techniques were deployed for only 30 percent of their initiatives, those same initiatives generated 50 percent of their revenues and profits. This book offers a roadmap for this kind of success.
Business Models for Transforming Customer Relationships What if there were a way to turn occasional, sporadic transactions with customers into long-term, continuous relationships--while simultaneously driving dramatic improvements in operational efficiency? What if you could break your existing trade-offs between superior customer experience and low cost? This is the promise of a connected strategy. New forms of connectivity--involving frequent, low-friction, customized interactions--mean that companies can now anticipate customer needs as they arise, or even before. Simultaneously, enabled by these technologies, companies can create new business models that deliver more value to customers. Connected strategies are win-win: Customers get a dramatically improved experience, while companies boost operational efficiency. In this book, strategy and operations experts Nicolaj Siggelkow and Christian Terwiesch reveal the emergence of connected strategies as a new source of competitive advantage. With in-depth examples from companies operating in industries such as healthcare, financial services, mobility, retail, entertainment, nonprofit, and education, Connected Strategy identifies the four pathways--respond-to-desire, curated offering, coach behavior, and automatic execution--for turning episodic interactions into continuous relationships. The authors show how each pathway creates a competitive advantage, then guide you through the critical decisions for creating and implementing your own connected strategies. Whether you're trying to revitalize strategy in an established company or disrupt an industry as a startup, this book will help you: Reshape your connections with your customers Find new ways to connect with existing suppliers while also activating new sources of capacity Create the right revenue model Make the best technology choices to support your strategy Integrating rich examples, how-to advice, and practical tools in the form of "workshop chapters" throughout, this book is the ultimate resource for creating competitive advantage through connected relationships with your customers and redefined connections in your industry.