IntelliVen.com is a site for chief executive officers, managing directors, executive directors, and chief administrators; that is, it’s for the person in charge of any organization —no matter how large or small—and those who aspire to hold such roles. Continue reading
A Revenue Forecast asserts that a certain amount of revenue will be earned in a certain period of time with a certain probability that the actual revenue earned in the period will be within a certain tolerance of the forecast. For example, management may forecast that there is a 90% chance of actual revenue being not more than 10% less than a forecasted amount.
Generally speaking, the percent probability of revenue from a source is assigned by management based on their judgement in light of their collective past experience with similar revenue generating opportunities in similar circumstances.
Some managers set forecasts equal Expected Value; that is, their revenue forecast equals the sum of potential revenue generating opportunities each multiplied by an assigned probability of occurring. There are several potential problems with this approach that should be considered carefully before proceeding:
Leaders who are in control of their operations compare their organization’s actual performance results to:
In order to increase the odds of engagement, happiness, and high-performance great leaders learn what people they work with like to do and what they are good at doing so they can be aligned with what they want.
Many people want to do something different than what they like and what they are good at because they believe others think that something else is more valued. Continue reading
The following offers a useful way to think about strategy and matters directly related to it:
Whether on campus or in the workplace, effective leadership involves seven disarmingly simple truths, says alumnus Peter F. DiGiammarino ’75. As the Eleanor Bateman Alumni Scholar in Residence for spring 2012, DiGiammarino led two events during which he offered advice on becoming an effective leader.
Peter DiGiammarino makes keynote dinner speech at awards function for Commonwealth College Honors students.
Leaders, he explained, “get loose.” Top leaders break through conventional boundaries to find new solutions to everyday problems. They also follow a set of powerful guidelines, which DiGiammarino breaks into actions driven by seven simple truths that he says can help facilitate change at any level.
These truths are:
1. An organization exists to solve a problem for people.
2. It takes a team. Continue reading
One of the leader’s most important jobs is to get and stay clear about what it is that he or she is counting on from each team member. Once the leader is clear, the message must be communicated to the team member. Often, the leader fails to engage in a rich communication apparently in favor of assuming that team members are somehow supposed to figure out for themselves exactly what is expected of them.
The steps below make explicit a conversation that will otherwise play-out inside of the heads of those involved. When the conversation is explicit the leader and team member get on the same page and dramatically increase the odds of high-performance and fulfilled expectations.
Contract: Get clear about what you want from each person. Continue reading
At the 2012 UMass Bateman Scholar Public Lecture, IntelliVen founder and CEO PeterD presented a 45 minute lecture that summarizes 35 years of insight gleaned from successfully helping dozens of organizations get on track to long-term growth and performance, generally in the role of leader or an adviser to the founder, owner, investor, and/or the CEO of ventures with between 2 and 20 people positioning to grow to 200 to 2000.
These insights have been honed while teaching at a number of universities, most recently at American University where he serves as an adjunct professor teaching Master’s Students in Organization Development about leadership and organization analysis and strategy and at the UMass Commonwealth Honors College where he has served as guest lecturer on Leadership.
Now, in the hope of helping you Manage to Lead, please see him present about 50, from a library of more than 400, slides that summarize ever-evolving insights and lessons learned by clicking on the image below:
Slides for Manage to Lead Seven Truths to Help You Change the World
There really is “power in the pen”. The person who takes notes and then drafts and distributes the Meeting Record is demonstrating leadership. Deciding how what happened in a meeting is to be memorialized is a power move. Those who want to be leaders and who want to be powerful will find that owning and driving the process to produce Meeting Records is the way to go!
Every meeting has three kinds of outputs: Action Items, Continue reading
Developing a systematic approach to cultivating demand for its products and services is a key step in the evolution of every successful organization. Many early-stage leaders long for a silver-bullet solution; that is, they look to hire someone with a lot of contacts and an extroverted personality to hit the market and drum up demand. Such efforts usually fail.
Leaders cannot count on building a scalable demand creation system by hiring one super-salesman after another. There are simply not enough to go around. A better strategy is to figure out for themselves how to create demand for their offerings and then hire and train others to follow their lead.
What follows is a sure-fire method for figuring out how to systematically turn prospects into customers that every executive, client manager, product manager, and sales professional can and should add to their tool set. It takes a lot of work to prepare properly and to execute well in a teaching-mindset, instead of a selling one, but those who are up to the task will be well-rewarded.
Step-1: Describe what you think your prospect is trying to accomplish.
Use all the data about a top prospect you can get your hands on to describe what problem they seek to solve that your organization can help with. Continue reading
The problem with the word strategy is that there are many different ways to use the word and it conjures up different things for different people in different contexts. See for example the key Questions on Strategy addressed in the Master of Science in Organization Development class on Organization Analysis and Strategy at American University in Washington, DC.
When asked “What is your strategy?” you might want to ask in reply “for what?” because every organization has many strategies. There is a strategy for selling, delivery, product management, product development, recruiting, people development, growth, and so on. Each strategy addresses how things are done now and how they will change to achieve a certain envisioned future.