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 (note: picture source from Lisa Haneberg’s Management Craft blog)

Just recently, Lisa Haneberg had me join her for a “Fireside Chat” podcast for her popular management blog, Management Craft. During the interview she started talking about her favorite sentence in the whole book, and I knew just what she was talking about. The sentence is, “Denial is the opium of losers.” In the podcast we talk about what that means and how to avoid the problems it can cause. She also pointed out several other real keys to the book with amazing accuracy. Although we don’t quite solve every business problem in the world, we do talk about a new mantra to live by that should replace the old and ineffective phrase, “do more with less.”

You can listen to the podcast and read her post about the podcast or just listen to the podcast here.

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By: Michael Kanazawa 

One of the biggest challenges in driving strategic change is in following through on execution. On March 31, 2008, Lindsay Edmonds Wickman, associate editor for Chief Learning Officer Magazine, wrote an article titled Making Change Meaningful. In it, she cites BIG Ideas to BIG Results and points out one of the biggest problems in running a failed change program is not the just the missed opportunities for business improvement, but creating a jaded and cynical workforce that won’t respond over time. There is a strategic role that CLOs are well positioned to play in integrating business strategy and leadership to accomplish breakthrough resutls and avoid the common pitfalls of in strategy execution. There has long been a gap between business operations and leadership development, so as Scott Adams’ book title aptly points out, be cautious of where and how you step forward in exapanding the CLO role to be more strategic. (more…)

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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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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

In the March 17th edition of BusinessWeek, on page 20, there is a picture of our book with Good to Great. And in that article you can see Jim Collins’ name appear with just two other authors being mentioned, Michael Kanazawa and Robert Miles. Not bad company for a book that has sold 3.6 million copies. It was truly exciting to be in such good company.

The article is based on the idea that top selling business books have something specific in common. They have red covers. But beyond the covers, the two books also drive for the same type of greatness in organizations. Jim Collins’ Good to Great identified the key ideas and principles through historical research. BIG Ideas to BIG Results shows exactly how to put a process in place and how to lead a great company. (more…)

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By: Robert H. Miles, Ph.D.

A recent article in the Theory & Practice section of The Wall Street Journal raised the issue of the importance of Speed in management. Titled “Speed is Key Question as New CEOs Remake Team,” the piece reported that while management churn can be a problem, many CEOs wish they had moved faster in removing dysfunctional or non-supportive executives from their team.

This finding squares with my experience over many years from my corporate transformation practice, but it the tip of the iceberg, Speed a much bigger, more pervasive challenge to that the singular aspect highlighted in the article. It is multidimensional in its impact on the ultimate success or failure of corporate transformation attempts.

So multidimensional is the speed factor in execution that I call it the “New Management Discipline,” a theme that comes through strongly in my new book with Mike Kanazawa, BIG Ideas to BIG Results: Remake and Recharge Your Company, Fast. (more…)

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By: Michael Kanazawa 

Bob is co-author of BIG Ideas to BIG Results. Early in his career he taught at Harvard Business School, the Yale School of Management and the Stanford Executive Institute, was Dean of Faculty at the Emory School of Business, has written several books on corporate transformation, and is the father of the management area called macro-organizational behavior. For me, he has been a consultant, advisor, mentor and now a business partner and collaborator. But, some people don’t know Bob, at least as well as I do.  But don’t go out and Google him. Let me tell you about Bob, who now serves as Chairman of Dissero Partners.

By the way, if you do Google Bob Miles, the first three hits are for a marine plumber, a musician and a realtor. Robert H. Miles will get you a lot of professional information about him, but let me tell you about the real Bob here instead - you won’t find this on the Internet. (more…)

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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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