Andre's new novel, The Jerusalem Cycle is on sale now.
Andre's new novel, The Jerusalem Cycle is on sale now.
I would like to draw attention to a phenomena now taking place and shaping public opinion: performance incentive excesses in the private sector and the subsequent political and popular backlashes.
Today, many view bonus and incentive programs with suspicion. They believe them to be fraudulent, immoral and more importantly unfair to taxpayers who have bailed out so many organizations who failed to ensure good governance. The people, as in "We the people", now believe that greed is at the heart of corporate incentive and bonus programs. They do not accept as true, that these programs were put into place as a vehicle to improve performance. Not anymore.
Oddly enough, this is not a new issue.
(May 2007)
Imagining possible futures and exploring how a business can re-shape itself are critical conditions for strategy development. A different type of leadership will and is required to deal with the structural changes that are taking place in the market place. Under the heading of leadership lurk five 21st century skills: 1. Global fluency, 2. Predisposition to innovate, 3. Capability to predict customer needs, 4. Strategy assembling and 5. Organizational tuning.
(October 2007)
I was recently asked to work on a development program to transform a conventional organization into an innovative and creative place to work in. As the title of this paper implies, there are many strategies to generate innovation, and that's precisely what we will be discussing in this document.
We are obliged for clarity's sake to make a distinction between creativity and innovation. There are three important reasons to do so. Firstly, because these concepts are often mistaken for one another and shouldn't.
(May 2007)
Integrity isn’t a value … anymore. If that’s regrettable, it could be argued that it’s just a point of view. However, value or not, integrity is a core element in an organization that wants to survive its employees! In a business setting, integrity is about displaying full, unwavering truthfulness with regard to what we say and do. Our level of integrity is tested and determined by how honest we are in difficult situations where the right answer requires courage and a clear understanding of what’s ethical. We can safely say that the work place is replete with those opportunities.
(March 2005)
As a management consultant for the last 10 years, I have been concerned for some time by what I see as the ineffectiveness of company development and training programs. Too often, top management relies on management change programs without any idea what the end result might be. My experience has shown me that such programs generally fail to generate conviction or engagement or, sadly, even enhance the competency of managers. Too often, today’s managers have not reinvented themselves: they still rely on what they learned in school 10, 20, or more years earlier – light years in terms of our fast-changing business environment. We need to revisit the concept of competence and define a new model of competency for a manager.
(October 2004, revised March 2007)
Beyond our understanding of customers’ requests and implicit expectations, there are other needs due to global changes. They are usually unspoken and unwritten. Nevertheless they are so important and fundamental that customers will do almost anything to satisfy them.
(June 2003)
Today more than ever organizations are accountable to their shareholders and employees for their performance. Their collective futures depend largely on the organization’s capacity to quickly adjust to shifting markets and world events. We require nimble and agile organizations with a real capacity for change. In that context we can ask ourselves if we can apply the speed or velocity of change to people’s capacity to transform their behaviors and habits. But can people change quickly?
(June 2003)
If your front-line employees understand what their job is in terms of pleasing and satisfying customers, and if their roles are played out and reinvented every day to ensure customer happiness, perhaps you’d better check whether the outcomes are quite what you expect. Chances are that your customers have transformed themselves – most likely without your help!
The belief that customer satisfaction correlates with customer loyalty (or retention) may have become a hopeless concept, even as the uninitiated are finally grasping the notion.
(November 2000)
If our department is seen as “overhead,” its end is in sight. There are alternatives.
Providers of corporate services—ranging from Information Systems, Human Resources, and Finance, to Internal Audit and Communications—are facing a tough challenge: how to become a full partner in their organization, not just a cost of doing business.
Most organizations function in difficult, complex environments and conditions. Those muted sounds of frustration, discontent and even exasperation are caused most often by changes assaulting citizens, organizations, employees as well as management – every single day.