A liberating look at the real reasons organization-wide improvement efforts fail and how, when all attempts have failed, you can help your organization to become great. As the authors of this eye-opening new work make clear, to enact real change, organizations need to shake off their immaturity and grow up. Shifting away from the tendency to lay all the blame on bad leadership, Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little: Overcoming Organizational Immaturity offers specific answers for why most organizational improvement efforts fail. Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little explains the difficulties and dangers of organizational immaturity, then provides proven, effective tools and ideas for achieving change within the limitations of an immature organization. With this guide, leaders and other stakeholders will be able to determine the maturity level of an organization, get beyond prevailing myths about how change gets derailed, and identify potential areas for improvement.
From the ill-fated dot-com bubble to unprecedented merger and acquisition activity to scandal, greed, and, ultimately, recession -- we've learned that widespread and difficult change is no longer the exception. By outlining the process organizations have used to achieve transformational goals and by identifying where and how even top performers derail during the change process, Kotter provides a practical resource for leaders and managers charged with making change initiatives work.
This text explores the experiences of tempered radicals. These are people who want to become valued and successful members of their organisations without selling out on who they are and what they believe in.
Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn’t it be great to have a simple explanation of how to collect, analyze, report, and use measurements to improve your organization? Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does the book explain the “why” of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process for creating a report card that provides a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way—the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. The report card provides a simple tool for viewing the health of your organization, from the outside in. You will learn how to measure the key components of the report card and thereby improve real measures of business success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising. This book: Provides a step-by-step guide for building an organizational effectiveness report card Takes you from identifying key services and products and using metrics, to determining business strategy Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise, including IT
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.
Learn how to measure success at the individual and organizational levels. By measuring success in multiple dimensions using multivariate methods you will be able to determine what works and what doesn’t. The key is to measure and promote progress in terms of organizational vision, mission, and overarching goals. Business leaders too often succumb to the working assumption that they only have to show shareholders and boards of trustees that they are turning a profit—the higher the profit, the more successful their stewardship of the company. Wrong! To truly thrive and endure, all organizations—corporate, government, small, large, nonprofit, or startup—need to define and pursue the underlying purpose for their existence. To measure success, leaders today are missing a key meta-analytic in their toolbox. In this book, metrics consultant Martin Klubeck provides it to them. Success Metrics steps you through the process of identifying and combining the right measures to gauge, narrate, and guide your organization's progress toward true success. All organizations have a common goal to be successful. All leaders want to make data-informed decisions and use measures to improve processes, communicate progress, and gain support. The problem is that proxy or partial measures don’t measure overall success and can be misleading. They measure performance parameters, progress on a specific task, customer feedback, and other piecemeal indices—which taken separately fail to describe an organization’s progress toward overall success. The author's integrated measures of success can be used to communicate organizational progress to stakeholders, shareholders, boards of trustees, corporate leaders, the workforce, and the customer base and thereby galvanize broad commitment to organizational success. Klubeck shows how his principles and methods of measuring overall success can be applied at all levels: individual, team, group, department, division, and organization. What You Will Learn: Understand why you should measure success instead of performance Understand what to measure and what not to measure Integrate the measures of success to tell a complete story Share measures of success with different audiences Who This Book Is For Organizational leaders at all levels from the executive suite to middle management, analysts and consultants who are tasked with designing metrics programs for organizations, individuals interested in adapting the author's framework to measure overall personal success in multiple dimensions
Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn’t it be great to have a fast, simple explanation of how to plan for and then design measurements to improve your organization? Planning and Designing Effective Metrics—an abridged version of author and metrics expert Martin Klubeck's Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results—provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does this brief book explain the "why" of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process to create a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. This book: Provides a guide for planning and designing useful metrics based on your unique organizational needs Offers the theory behind metrics to help you get exponentially better practical results Shows how to select and use the proper tools for creating, implementing, and using metrics Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise Planning and Designing Effective Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way—the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. You will learn how to create valuable measures of organizational success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising. That will help you not only to improve organizational results—you'll also multiply your career opportunities.
The chapters in this book are contributed by visionaries who see the need for business leaders to define their organizations to be agile and robust in the face of external changes. The goal is to build something knowing that it will be changed; so that you have no need to go back to the metaphorical drawing board for every market condition change. In his Foreword, Keith Swenson asks you, "Consider what it means to say that the business will adapt in the face of external changes. The business architecture is not simply a model that specifies how to run the business for now and the next few years. The people making the architecture cannot know the pressures that will be faced. Instead, it must support leaders and executives within the organization to make consistently good decisions on how to adapt their practices. The architecture is not a plan that anticipates all the decisions; instead it embodies a set of core guiding principles that enable decision-making." Understand that the term “business” used this way is not limited to for-profit enterprises but includes all forms of organizations that have a strategic need to accomplish goals. Pragmatically speaking, business architecture is the conceptual understanding that people have on why particular choices were made in forming the organization in a particular way. This book will help you understand your options and how to relate them to your own organization.
#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.
