clarion calls
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The Industrialist’s Proposal: How Does The Industrialist Successfully Engage With The Digital World?
Everyone's talking about it (and has been for a while): the digital revolution.…
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Value Co-Creation: Charting the Path
Almost every day, we hear comments from our clients that illustrate their rising levels of anxiety: "Our organization seems stuck in time and our culture keeps us from innovating at the speed the market is moving"; "We can't keep slugging it out for market share in a low growth industry";…
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Change - The Map is Not the Territory
Navigating change successfully in a complex world requires a different orientation than what many of today's leaders are used to. So, what does a 21st century approach for navigating change look like? And what, more specifically, does holding the broader context require? …
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Structureless Structures
As innovative models, particularly structure-less structures, are rapidly replacing traditional business hierarchies, many of our industries, and the businesses within them, may be ill positioned to respond, as new business models emerge and ways of operating drastically change. …
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CEO Participation on Other Company Boards
Should a CEO serve as a Director on other companies' Boards? From the perspective of the CEO's own Board, does having their CEO serve as a Director on other Boards contribute to or detract from their own company's performance. The answer is not always simple or clear. …
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Selecting the Right Global Leader
Getting the right global talent means balancing culture fit and business model fit between the home country and the away country. This speaks to really understanding the issues that the company faces in the local market. We see four types of possible leaders, depending on how the cultures and busine…
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Shifting Paradigms When Going Global
What stamps do you need to have in your passport to global success? It takes more than just going there and being there, although that is a start. Companies and their leaders must have different knowledge: in addition to knowing the exchange rate, it helps to understand the needs of the local market…
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The Leader’s Role: New Conditions for Effectiveness
The digital revolution changes everything. We know that the relationships between companies and consumers have shifted: consumers are more active participants in the creation of value-added products and services. The factors contributing to that shift (e.g., proliferation of social media, access to…
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Employee Engagement in an e-Bricks World
Employee engagement has traditionally been achieved through human interaction in the physical work place. But the increasing incidence of full-time and part-time virtual workers is eroding the role of physical space and physical interactions in building employee engagement. Leaders – who still want…
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Culture's Role in Creating Value
Why do you care about culture? Because it can help or hinder the achievement of your goals. Culture can hold an organization together in tough times. Culture can create the internal alignment than enables you to reproduce the customer experience at different times in different places. Companies with…
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Movie Quotes To Lead By!
Leaders look for inspiration in many places. In books. In Nature. In their spiritual practice. In movies. Movies can grab us, can make us see another point of vie, can linger with us. They can shape our ideas about what we want to be. They can launch flights of fancy about what can be achieved. They…
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Ready, or Not?
Consumers' experience with internet access and social media is changing their notions of how they relate to businesses: they expect to play a more active role in shaping the products and services they buy.…
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Never Satisfied: Know and Grow Your Business, Your Team and Yourself
An organization that performs well in a crisis will not necessarily perform well in calmer times. Surviving the recent economic crisis doesn’t mean you will now prevail. But senior leaders can leverage their dissatisfaction with the status quo to grow their businesses, their teams and themselves.…
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Do You Have the Right Talent and Capabilities to Grow?
New avenues of growth may need new business models, which may need new capabilities. Four talent management best practices can help leaders align talent with strategic goals: Strategic Organization Review, Capability Requirements Segmentation, Talent Risk Assessment and Capability Development.…
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Avenues of Trust: How to Re-Route Your Business
Customer interaction with businesses has changed; there is erosion in established avenues of trust. We examine some causes of the erosion, offer what others have done to address that, and provide steps that any company can take to build new avenues of trust for their customers to travel.…
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Emerging from Economic Contraction: Senior Leaders' Role
Senior leadership teams are responsible for both the short term and long term, however tempting it is to focus only on short term viability. We offer ideas on how to test and release old market assumptions, develop growth strategies, and align talent and organization structures to produce renewal.…
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HR In Turbulent Time: The Call to Lead
Dramatic changes in business models are driving the need for commensurate levels of change in how human capital is deployed and managed. We offer some thoughts on the critical components of successful HR transformations, including ideas, tools and practices to provoke thinking and guide leaders.…
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Down to Basics: The Fundamental Theory of the Business
The financial crisis has shaken belief in business leaders’ competence. This reminds us that it is easy to live with prevailing notions of the business. We offer both a view on why adjusting the Theory of the Business is such a challenge and approaches to solve for it at the root cause level.…
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Making Market Segmentation Work
Many companies (this article focuses on insurance companies) are migrating to market-segment focused strategies and structures. There are four inputs that are critical to your success: define the segment, design the customer experience, create a brand army and create the enabling structures.…
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The Centers of Acceleration Boost
This paper refreshes our concept of Centers of Acceleration vs. Centers of Excellence. To provide high-level technical support and expert advice to business units, and truly accelerate the progress of the business units being supported, there are some steps that companies can take.…
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Exploring White Space
A business’s strategy, structure and behavior must align. Leaders must attend to all three parts. The parts must be right for each other. And leaders must think about the interactions in terms of motion, speed, innovation and the necessity of change. Alignment may be the biggest challenge of all.…
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Horizon 1-2-3: A More Complete View
Managing a growth portfolio is tricky. Having ideas at all three stages of development is necessary for long-term growth. It is easy to misstep in moving ideas from one stage to another. But missteps can be reduced if leaders know where to look in their pursuit of growth.…
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Successfully Handling the Transition to Private Equity Ownership
Leadership teams moving into private equity ownership face challenges: transition distraction, lack of clarity and communication, turnover, uncertainty, dissidence from stay-on incentives, and involvement of PE owners. Learn how to make these transitions faster, smoother and more efficient.…
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Ensuring Transformation ROI
Many change efforts don’t meet expectations. A well-prepared transition team can make a difference. A small investment there can pay big dividends in the long run. This article outlines several approaches to help transform the team into successful transformers themselves.…
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Mindset Shift: At the Heart of Moving Forward
Business is always changing; mindset must follow at an equivalent rate. But the familiar can be more comforting than unknown possibilities. Mindset change requires leadership. Several approaches that help top teams shift mindset and encourage buy-in for important transformation are outlined.…
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Leadership Vision in a Kaleidoscopic World
Running businesses requires that C-Suites integrate complexity and simplify to the essence. If the C-suite is the brain, Finance is the Central Nervous System, flowing information to maintain vital signs. This piece examines the evolution of Finance and current trends in Best Practices firms.…
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A Breach in the Levee: The Changing Role of Corporate Responsibility
The Katrina disaster response drove private corporations to step in to fill the holes left by government and public institutions. What level of corporate responsibility is right? What is the corporate role in disaster planning and prevention? Corporate responsibility may never be the same.…
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Hull Design and Organization Structure
There are parallels between boat design – what makes boats fast and nimble or stable and slow – and organization design. Five key boat design criteria are examined: speed, agility, stability, slice and buoyancy. These can help organizations as they move to maturity.…
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Wearing SOX Inside Out: Creating a Culture of Transparency
Leaders can turn costly compliance issues (such as Sarbanes-Oxley) into pragmatic sources of discovery and transformation to strengthen the norms and behaviors that lead to financial success. Embracing transparency can lead to better thinking, development and innovation.…
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Centers of Acceleration vs. Centers of Excellence
To provide technical support and expert advice to business units, many companies establish Centers of Excellence. In order to reap the benefits, we outline some steps that help companies reconsider them as Centers of Acceleration, whose job it is to accelerate the progress of the business units.…
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The War for Talent: Lessons from the Front
Playing exclusively to the needs of company stars may play havoc with the best interests of the company. It is a challenge to develop strong talent and reward actual performance AND to create a culture buttressed by systems and management that bring out the best in people.…
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To Merge or Not to Merge
More companies are looking at M+As as a potential avenue of growth. We have some ideas about what often goes wrong and some suggestions for leaders about both things they are in a position to direct pre-close and surprises they can expect to deal with in the post-close weeks and months.…
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With Strategy in Mind: It’s Time We Look Inside
This piece describes some recent developments in neuroscience and what they reveal about strategic decision making, and suggests some things that leaders can do to counteract individual bias, to increase awareness of individual bias, and to create the mental space to realize strategic insights.…
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Getting a Jump on the Competition: Spotlight Strategic Opportunities
Coming out of the recession, companies making good strategic choices can leap ahead of the competition. Read how our framework for finding opportunities, pinpointing gaps and seeing roadblocks helped one company analyze its situation, find new opportunities, and realign to move in a new direction.…
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Navigating a New Landscape: Challenging Old Assumptions
Many leaders created growth by extending and optimizing existing business models to yield greater returns. When the current economic contraction does eventually turn, leaders will need to adapt to new markets. We offer a framework for reassessing their business models and growth strategies.…
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Talent, A Key Ingredient for Your Business – Now and in the Future
Hard times offer a chance for leaders to move from management into true leadership: to restore faith and renew a sense of purpose so that talent can truly contribute. Read why many talent systems fail to deliver; get ideas to make enabling talent a part of the natural rhythm of the business.…
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Encouraging Innovation: Pampering the Goose
Business leaders, individually and as a team, have the responsibility for enabling innovation in their organization: for nurturing the Golden Egg-laying Goose. They must manage the balance, for instance, between pure creativity and pure analytics; and they must be innovators themselves.…
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Team at the Top: Their Unique Mandate
The team at the top is in the position of having the entire organizational picture in their view, with the ability to impact the organization in a lasting way. This team has unique responsibilities and must deliver on a mandate that cannot be satisfied from any other seat in the business.…
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Balancing Tensions at the Top: the Amazing Ambidextrous Executive
It’s hard to sustain the top management balancing act. The ability to achieve and maintain the balance between opposing tensions is a critical skill for top managers. We discuss the balancing role, the challenge of identifying and developing this skill, and some ideas about finding balance.…
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Spider Think: A Shift in Perspective
A shift in perspective can be an amazingly freeing experience. It allows us to break away from rigid frameworks, gain fresh insights and see new possibilities. See how breaking mental barriers and allowing creativity can help leaders understand and solve challenging problems.…
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Organicity: Transforming Our View of Business
Organicity – a concept of organizations as natural systems – is a way for leaders to understand, reframe and consider changes within their organizations. This has implications for business leaders, with its potential value in creating adaptive, fluid and responsive organizations.…
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Cultivating Renewal through Smart Growth
All businesses experience a progression from infancy through high growth and prime performance, into stability and eventual decline. Some companies find ways to cycle from stability back to high growth. Smart Growth takes its cue from nature, pruning and grafting to nurture the fruits of renewal.…
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What If: Awakening to a New Day
One of the most important leadership qualities is the ability to project a clear vision of the future. But how to do that when the future is increasingly unpredictable? We discuss Scenario Planning as a way to increase leadership capacity and make organizations more agile and resilient.…
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Unlock the Potential Within: A Context for Positive Growth
Helping individuals and senior teams become more effective means going beyond mere symptoms in order to uncover root causes. If individual performance is on target yet there is untapped potential as a team, behavioral alignment can help to move the organization closer to achieving its goals.…
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Reality or Illusion: A 3-D Organizational Assessment
Many leaders rely on what their people tell them about the realities of their businesses. Failure to recognize less tangible facts about the business can have potentially severe consequences. Forensic Organizational Analysis can be a predictive tool for revealing true organizational health.…
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The Container Effect
Corporations search for profit; individuals need greater purpose. The Container Effect results from people embracing corporate value structures that overlook or conflict with their personal belief systems. We need to reestablish a connection between our work and our larger sense of purpose.…
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Space Has Its Place
Retail businesses often succeed based on their ability to use space to influence buying habits. But any business that requires in-person interaction should consider their space usage. We offer some practical ideas on how to use space to improve internal environments and customer interaction.…
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Building the Capacity to Fly
Leaders often struggle to recruit, develop, retain and leverage talent. To help them clarify what is needed, we offer tips on building success profiles based on the 3Cs of behavior: capabilities, characteristics and capacities.…
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Organization Design: The Blueprint for Success
Many companies attempt to address M+As, new subsidiaries and upheavals from re-engineering through new organization structures. We believe the real issues lie in strategy, management infrastructures and behavior. Only after those have been examined should new organization structure be introduced.…
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Operating Models: Gearing Up for Optimal Performance
There is a unique blend of strategy, management infrastructure and organizational behaviors needed to bring each business to life. Only when these three components are aligned and linked into a cohesive model does the business really kick into gear.…
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Structure As Strategy: Designing for Growth
Good organization design – aligned structure – is often viewed as an enabler of strategy. While this (and its converse: the wrong structure can disable strategy) may be true, we believe that structure can be seen as somewhat more powerful, as part of the strategy itself.…
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Succession Success: Lessons on CEO Transitioning
Leaders spend their careers preparing for the moment they are offered a CEO role; boards and owners give serious attention to their selection. But CEO tenures are not always successful. Part of the problem is the transition process itself. There are steps to take to ensure succession success.…