By Michael Kanazawa 

In the January 2008 edition of Harvard Business Review, two feature articles make a clear case for BIG Ideas to BIG Results and specifically the use of the ACT (Accelerated Corproate Transformation) process for driving breakthrough corporate performance.

In one article, titled “Transforming Giants”, Rosabeth Moss Kanter states, “The key, I’ve concluded, is that a decisive shift is occuring in what might be called the guidance systems of these global giants. Employees once acted mainly according to rules and decisions handed down to them, but they now draw heavily on their shared understanding of mission and on a set of tools available everywhere at once. This shift is often heralded, and in most of these companies it has been a long time coming. But now it is happening with dramatic effects.”

Our ACT process has been honed, accelerated, and streamlined for 25 years as a way for companies to focus, align, and engage entire organizaitons quickly. It becomes a system where accountabilities are strong, but at the same time provides for true engagement of the workforce. In fact, out of the 350 executive interviews Kanter and her team conducted, one person cited in the article is Sam Palmisano of IBM. Back in the 1990s when IBM made the dramatic shift to a services business model, the ACT process was used to engage the biggest part of the new IBM Global Services business unit in the transformation of IBM. The results were remarkable. (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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