By Michael Kanazawa

Frequently in working with large company executives looking to move into a new business sector and entrepreneurs looking for funding, I’m asked what should be in the business plan or strategy. A second question not always asked, but necessary to answer, is what makes for a successful business plan or strategy. One great resource is to look at Sequoia Capital’s tips for success and business plan outline. They certainly have some great proof points, having invested in the founders of Google, Apple, Oracle and Pay-Pal. Sequoia published two great lists that are fantastic resources to leverage and apply the best of what they’ve learned by launching these types of growth companies. Read the rest of this entry »

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By Michael Kanazawa

Very often you’ll see companies slip into a mode where they start growing by the averages, benchmarking expense ratios, setting “competitive” pricing, and “market-level” salaries. It’s not necessarily bad to play by the averages unless it leads to being an average company. Great companies are built and run by great people. How can you get there?

The Container Store is a story in corporate success. They have been consistently growing at double digit rates and have been listed as one Forbes’ Top 100 companies to work for, eight years in a row. In the tough business of retailing, especially with bigger rivals such as Target, Sears, and Walmart, The Container Store is setting it’s own standards for innovative products and great customer service.

One of the most innovative ideas at The Container Store is their formula for talent management. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Middle Manager Tips for Leading Breakthrough Strategies [32:03m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (14)

In this interview, Wayne Turmel and I talk about how to implement the best ideas in our book to the tough jobs middle managers face. We discussed how to tell people that their project isn’t a top priority, how to work through competing priorities when some of those are being presented by sales people as critical, and how to build organizational power by leveraging “The Power Curve” as you ascend the corporate ladder.

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 Doing More On Less [28:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (23)

Listen as Mike talks with Lisa Haneberg author of the Management Craft blog during one of her fireside chat sessions.

Lisa has a very unique perspective in the interview in that she focused on the challenges of middle managers and she has been a manager herself facing many of the challenges we talk about in the book. It was a fun and lively conversation and one of my favorite interviews to date. Hope you’ll enjoy it and find good value in it as well. This is a second post, but people had asked to have the MP3 file available here. My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-b720560dbb15c2bd3b4fc510cc1d2c27}

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 Avoid Corporate Change Sugar Highs [7:26m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (40)

In this podcast, we discuss how corporate change programs can feel like “sugar highs” to people where the energy spikes up for a short moment and then the program is quickly abandoned and is replaced or overshadowed by the next wave of change programs. In this mode, some leaders start to believe the old saying that, “people hate change.” We talk about how that actually isn’t true. The truth is that people don’t hate change, they hate corporate change programs. Our challenge as leaders is to break that cycle and approach strategic transformation and change in a way that engages people, creates ownership and produces breakthrough results. It can be done.

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 An Interview With Mike Kanazawa [16:17m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (28)

Podcasting has become a new form of personal expression as well as a very targeted media channel. Through the experience of launching the book, I’ve been diving head first into the world of podcasting.

The greatest surprise for me has been finding individuals who are passionate about some specific content. They are not focused on content that will support advertising business models, but rather content that is purely focused on what interests them and their listeners.

One of those people, Brian Oates, of Imprint at Daxle.net recently interviewed me for his series of author interviews. In preparing for the interview, I became curious about how he got into the “business” of podcasting and what he gets in return…as in profits. It was a bit forward to ask, but he had just finished interviewing me and I was curious. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Breaking Gridlock and Task Overload [5:31m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (43)

In this Quick Start Tip we talk about one of the biggest impediments to business growth, which is a lack of focus that goes far enough to create task overload, organizational gridlock that feels to employees like corporate attention deficit disorder. We discuss specific ways to get your organization more focused to gain the ability to take your big ideas to big results.

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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. Read the rest of this entry »

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