Here are a few question to address your organization's problem-solving effectiveness:
Tue, 07/10/2012 - 13:30
Sat, 03/31/2012 - 12:43
Today, I attended the Wall Street Journal series of events entitled How I Built It. As a follow-on to their ongoing column where they profile entrepreneurs who have built successful enterprises, they are doing a small "nationwide" tour where their small business editor (and the audience) interviews a group of 6 of these folks in an attempt to better understand their experiences, success models etc…
At today's even t(3/31/11), attendees included the founders/co-founders from the following firms: Popchips, One Kings Lane, Thrillist.com, Ouidad and Reef.
Mon, 03/22/2010 - 10:50
When it comes to leading and managing an organization of high performers, a leader needs to focus alternately on selection, development, focus and alignment with a fair amount of reinforcement thrown in. If they do this effectively, they optimize their people. That is, they create a powerful, highly capable, enthusiastic team or set of teams that gets the right things done right and achieves goals. Unfortunately, far too many do not do this at all.
The purpose of these discussions is to lay out the concepts, ideas, tools, programs and case studies on how to accomplish this. It is a complex area in the sense that there are many levers and many variables that need to be aligned and properly focused. On the other hand, the most powerful ideas and tools are common sense-based once there is an accurate understanding of the people, processes and markets. Please feel free to comment or begin a discussion on any thread.
Mon, 09/01/2008 - 13:09
How effective are your "people" decisions?
Making the right decisions regarding the WHO in your organizations involves two often sub-optimally done activities
- Choosing the right person for the job.
- Ensuring that each person's competencies, skills and attitudes are a fit for high performance for their overall role in the organization.
These are at the core of people optimization in businesses. A relatively recent buzzword term that seeks to encompass these issues is talent management. In any case, if you assess the activities of the most successful leaders in organizations, you'll find they put far more time, attach far higher priority and indeed have a highly significant focus on these issues of people selection and fit. When you see an organization struggling with decline or mediocrity, it is also nearly always not present in any effective way. In these cases, the leader often not only ignores a basic responsibility but largely as a result, creates incredible waste and a whole host of problems that they need to address daily - unfortunately this is often compounded with attempts at quick fixes and stop-gap measures.
Thu, 04/03/2008 - 18:25
The goal of people optimization is surprisingly not that common of a goal - at least overtly. Part of the issue we've found, is that for whatever reason people make some kind of value judgment that you can't optimize people or at least shouldn't be overt in doing this (Come on!). Other perspectives seem to center around a belief that somehow this violates the golden rule - … so you don't optimize you choose the best people you can or you treat people right and they'll treat you right or you can't motivate people they have to motivate themselves or my human resource manager is dealing with that using Talent Management and on and on … (Again, come on!) I wouldn't argue with any one of these, except perhaps the HR one, but just like you can't "eat right" by just eating bananas, optimizing people, while not overly complex conceptually is certainly complex enough that it involves a number of variables with which a business leader needs to be deal.
We believe that as a management focus that the focus on people optimization not only has validity, but that it is the most powerful way of ensuring you make the right people decisions and as a result optimize the performance of your organization.
One of the most difficult challenges managers face is choosing the right people and understanding how to get them to perform at their best. During the last 12 years of our experience, we have found no other tool except the Harrison Assessment that enables this kind of capability with incredible accuracy and insight.
"The U.S. Department of Labor has estimated the costs to replace an employee to be approximately 1/3 their annual salary; but when you start looking at the impact of hiring the wrong employee and having to replace them, some studies say 2.5 times annual earnings, some 4 times and some even higher." AGILEdge
