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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BNET is featuring a podcast on BIG Ideas to BIG Results on it’s home page. In the podcast I explain to BNET host Carmine Gallo the most important things to getting started right with change or transformation efforts, why speed is important, and specifically how to engage hundreds or thousands of employees quickly and effectively with a very simple technique described in our book as “table work.”

To listen, download and share the podcast, please click through on the link below.

BNET’s Useful Commute
Guest: Michael Kanazawa - coauthor BIG Ideas to BIG Results
Host: Carmine Gallo
http://blogs.bnet.com/intercom/?p=1686

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By Michael Kanazawa

This last week the team at 800CEORead hosted their second annual Pow Wow. It is a gathering of business book authors and other publishing industry leaders. I didn’t know what to expect when I agreed to go and walking into the lobby of the Catalyst Ranch, which had wild paint on the walls, a small spring loaded rocking horse that they said was adult sized, and retro furniture looking like a Lucy and Ricky Ricardo garage sale only added a few more questions in my mind…like what the heck am I doing here?

Although in reality, the other Pow Wow attendees I had met the night before the event at dinner had already convinced me that the whole trip to Chicago had been worth it. And now days after the event, I’m still just starting to really undertand the astounding generosity of knowledge, genunine and authentic connections and inspiration that was happening between all of us at the Ranch.

No matter how well we can chat up people through our bluetooth headset, connect ourselves together indefinitely through LinkedIn and write on each others’ blogs…there is still no substitute for face-to-face, real-world meetings. There is a great post on relationships on Tom Peters’ blog that talks about the power of relationships, even to the point of saying that more than logical thinking, the relationships between people is what has allowed man to win out over the beasts. (more…)

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October 22, 2007 

Barak Obama, though happily married, is looking to get engaged. Engaged with the American people, that is. It is not clear when the formula for Presidential campaign success became developing policy ideas and plans in a closed room with a few consultants and then proclaiming to the world that if elected you already have all of the final answers to put in place. The reality is, nobody believes one person can come up with all of the answers and nobody really wants a know-it-all as a leader. So, leaders can drive enormous action and breakthroughs when they learn how to truly engage the people around them. Obama almost got it perfect and we can all learn as business leaders from him.  (more…)

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By Michael Kanazawa

This post is based on a question by a reader looking for specific recommendations on how to inspire and engage people for maximum performance. The question is worded quite well because inspiration and engagement are more linked that people think.

All of the following tips are based on the principle that if employees are truly engaged in the business they will be inspired to drive for excellence. So, how does engagement happen? Here are five specific tips that you can implement immediately.

#1: Create a vision that is a “cause” (more…)

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By Michael Kanazawa

Suggestions boxes are a joke to most people in organizations. If they are successful, they get overloaded to the point that no staff person can even read through all of the suggestions much less make recommended business changes. But more often, they are a cold, demeaning reminder that low level people have no access to the leaders to provide input or feedback upwards.

In fairness to executives, many of the ideas are so far off the mark in terms of strategic direction or practicality that they are not even worth reading. Bottom line, they don’t create the right kind of dialogue they are intended to produce. There is a method that has been used successfully to generate breakthrough ideas from front-line teams to generate huge savings, jumps in sales, and stand-out customer service. Learn how to adopt this approach for your organization. (more…)

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