Your “Weekend Reading List” from Management Excellence

December 5, 2008 By 2 Comments
Suggestions from Management Excellence to Recharge and Refresh

Weekend Reading Suggestions to Recharge and Refresh

Beginning with this post, I intend to make “Your Weekend Reading List” a regular Friday feature.  Most professionals that I know are too busy to carve out quality reading time during the week, and many have confided that they wish they would be more diligent about reading on the weekend.  While I won’t be there to help you pick up the book or click on the link, I can at least try and remove the “I’m not sure what to read” excuse from your arsenal.

In what I promise will be (maybe) my last attempt to nag your conscience about this topic, I view reading as  critical for self-development as well as for recharging your intellectual batteries.  And I don’t suggest limiting your selections to those items in the business section of the magazine rack or the bookshelf.  As evidenced by my Recommendations List at Management Excellence, I encourage leaders and business professionals to read histories, biographies, books on physics and the classics.  Sneaking in an occasional mystery is also a good way to stimulate your divergent thinking skills!

OK, enough preaching and on to this weekend’s suggestions.  I’ll keep it short and this week, I’ll stay business focused.

The December 6 Issue of the Leadership Carnival at Great Leadership

The carnivals bring together some of the best minds and leading bloggers in management and human resources to cover a wide range of topics.  Instead of seeking out the best posts of leading consultants and bloggers, they are here under one umbrella for easy reading.  This is scheduled to go live on the 6th, so be sure to check it out.

Article: Where GM Went Wrong at Fortune.com

Like traffic slowing to pass a wreck, it’s almost impossible to not look on in both horror and fascination as this company which once was Master of the Universe now teeters on the brink of oblivion.  (Did you know that GM’s market cap is just over $1 billion and Toyota’s is some 160X greater.  How did this happen?)

Senior Editor, Alex Taylor III, covered GM for the past few decades and shares his fascinating insights into the culture, the leaders over time and the slow and methodical unraveling of this insular and grossly misguided company.  As we all face the reality of letting GM go or propping the firm up with our tax dollars, Taylor’s lengthy article (8 pages) is must reading.

Article: Big Blue’s Big Plan at Fortune.com

OK, this is a good issue of Fortune.   The sub-header, “IBM is drooling over the coming infrastructure boom.”  and IBM CEO Palmisano’s opening statement of, “We’ve been given this on a silver platter,” give you some clues to how IBM is looking at the global recession from a glass half-full perspective.  Another must-read article I guarantee will get you thinking about how you and your firm can find opportunity in chaos.  Pass this link along to your associates and fire up the divergent thinking!

Book: Winning, by Jack Welch with Suzy Welch

I’ve had this one in inventory for a couple of years and recently cracked the cover and remembered why I like Welch so much.  He cuts through the baloney and mysticism of topics like leadership, mission, vision, values and strategic planning, offering the reader practical, common-sense perspectives on driving results.  While his day at GE is over, like Drucker, the guidance is timeless.  In my opinion, the world would be better off with a few more like Welch in command today.

Book I’m Reading: Thinking About Quality, Progress, Wisdom and the Deming Philosophy, by Lloyd Dobyns and Clare Crawford-Mason.

Fresh from a great session teaching Quality Management to MBA students at DePaul University in Chicago, I’ve rediscovered my thirst for knowledge about Deming, his life and his philosophies.  This man gets too little credit for shaping the post World War II business world, and his “Theory of Profound Knowledge” is appropriate reading for these difficult times.

I just started this one from the hosts of the TV special, “If Japan Can, Why Can’t We,” that launched Deming into mainstream America 40  years after he had established himself as a near-god in Japan and other countries.  (I highly recommend the video…you can click on this YouTube link to the Deming special or search for Deming on the site to see the original program yourself.)  My early feedback on this 1994 (but timeless) book is, great!  I’ll keep you posted with a full review after I complete my “weekend reading.”

Now Grab a Cup of Coffee, Find a Comfortable Spot and Enjoy Your Reading Time!

Filed Under: Crisis Leadership, Leadership, Professional Growth Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Does Your City Government Treat You Like a Customer?

October 31, 2008 By Leave a Comment

This is my pre-election post on government, and I promise to stay focused on performance and not politics.  There’s enough hot air being expended by the candidates and pundits and I don’t need to add to the global warming.  However, it does seem like a good time for all of us to evaluate the return we are getting from government and frankly, ask for more.  And by more, I don’t mean more money or even government. I mean quality, performance, results, and yes, even a bit of good old-fashioned customer treatment.

A great example of government delivering on its responsibilities for its customers…yes, I said customers, is 2007 Malcolm Baldrige Award Winner, Coral Springs, Florida.  The city of Coral Springs won a Baldrige Award for Performance Excellence, a feat that is remarkable for even the best of businesses.

A little bit of background on this post.  I am working with a talented group of MBA students at DePaul University in Chicago studying the Baldrige program as a framework for performance excellence.  We are looking at the practices and results of great companies in all sectors of the economy,  and the idea of performance excellence in government seemed like a fitting pre-election topic.  As a group, we struggled to recall if and when we had ever felt like “customers” much less “satisfied customers” in our dealings with our community governments.

As an aside, most people mistakenly associate Baldrige with just quality, when in fact it is one of the most comprehensive programs in the world in challenging and guiding organizations to become great at creating value for stakeholders.  Of course, quality in all facets is at the center of this high performance formula.  Coral Springs is the only municipal government to win this award to-date, and offers some powerful lessons for all of our communities as we head to the polls to elect our leaders next week.

A few noteworthy points:

  • Coral Springs truly views its citizens and businesses as customers and designs all of its services to maximize customer satisfaction.  From Saturday hours to their “City Hall in the Mall” facility that provides added convenience for people going about their normal business.
  • The city is a model of strategic planning effectiveness, engaging stakeholders in the development of a strategic plan and importantly, the development and execution of this plan around clearly defined goals and objectives.
  • Continuous improvement is inherent in this community’s emphasis on measurement and control of critical processes.  From customer satisfaction to employee and volunteer satisfaction, to focusing on measuring, monitoring and improving around the processes that create value for citizens and businesses, Coral Springs runs like you would expect the most quality conscious business to run.
  • The results are clear and visible for all to see in the form of ongoing reporting of key performance indicators to remarkable achievements in delivering what the customers deemed important in a high-performance community.  From schools to traffic to safety, the community appears to have achieved results that most communities will envy.

The Bottom-Line for Now:

If you are intrigued and want more tangible information on what a city government looks like when it clearly identifies its customers and holds itself accountable to creating value for those customers, take a look at the Baldrige Video at the city’s website. Do yourself a favor and watch the long-form of the video, preferably before you head off to the polls to elect or re-elect your city officials.  Better yet, send these officials a link and ask them if they understand who their customers are and what you expect.  Perhaps if we all hold our officials accountable, we might just get a reasonable return for our investment.  About now, any form of positive return would be good.

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From Strategy-Starved to Strategy-Fueled: It’s All About Communication

April 2, 2008 By 1 Comment

"It’s a dirty little secret: Most executives cannot articulate the objective, scope, and advantage of their business in a simple statement. If they can’t, neither can anyone else," indicate David J. Colliss and Michael G. Rukstad in the opening of their article, "Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?" in the April, 2008 issue of Harvard Business Review.

In an MBA class on Project Management that I am currently teaching, this topic came up in the context of the role that project managers play in strategy execution.  This class of working professionals agreed that strategy execution is conducted largely via projects, yet it is uncommon for individuals in project management roles to be plugged into the strategic management process.  As such, there is little context for many of the critical decisions that arise in the form of executing major projects.  In my informal poll of the class participants, there was additional consensus that most organizations do a less than stellar job communicating strategy to the broader employee population.

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Filed Under: Project Management, Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,