by: Michael Kanazawa

CLO Magazine’s associate editor, Lindsay Edmonds Wickman, recently wrote a piece about how to better integrate people, operations and strategic initiatives across the business, titled From Ideas to Results: The CLO’s Role. The story is based on our BIG Ideas to BIG Results process and approach. For the article, Lindsay and I talked about the fact that too often, people development is treated as a separate activity from strategic planning which is also often separate from running operations. This lack of alignment puts CLOs in a difficult position of trying to drive people initiatives that may not be viewed as integral elements of executing the strategy. There are ways to improve the alignment that are outlined in the article. The article was sent out as an Executive Briefing to CLOs and other senior HR executives, but is useful for all types of leaders and managers who want to better enable their organizations to generate big ideas and turn them into big results.

The read the full article at the CLO Magazine site, click here.

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By Michael Kanazawa 

When things get stressful, we often throw out phrases automatically to try and get beyond the issues for the moment without really doing what is right. But often these phrases don’t do much to help in the moment and don’t’ solve the true issues either. There are a few sayings that we hear in business all of the time that are about as ineffective as parents yelling at their children, “do it because I said so.” Even worse, these sayings in business cause people to make poor decisions and undermine their own leadership potential by repeating these phrases without really thinking about what they mean.

One of the most popular and most damaging of these sayings is demanding that people need to do “more with less.” (more…)

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By: Michael Kanazawa 

AOL’s announcement to split in two is a great decision on focus, but seems very late. When AOL started, they created the best online experience by controlling the access, content, browser, content development platforms, and commerce tools. It was an all-in-one play that allowed them to do things that others couldn’t do in a simple way for the customer. Today, all of those elements have splintered and become industries of their own and have all become easier. There is less need for a single integrated platorm. AOL’s best attributes have always been about great experiences for the end-user customer, so how can they leverage that today?

One challenge in focus is that AOL still has two big segments of customers. Older email users who started on AOL because it was easy to use and never switched to other web email services like gmail or hotmail. Then there is a second segment of young customers who got to know AOL through Instant Messenger. These two segments are going to want completely different things from AOL and somehow they will need to figure out what their hooks will be going forward. Google has played it well with broad applications like search, maps, and posting videos. AOL will need to look closely at the needs of it’s customers and find the gaps, find the things that are still difficult on the web, and create a great customer experience out of those. Media management in the home and the fight for the digital living room is still a place where competing standards, tricky technology integration issues and no single platform may provide an opportunity.

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