Introducing Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World as an interactive digital workbook.

Many intelliven.com blog posts are based on the slides and lecture notes from a masters class in Organization Development called Organization Analysis and Strategy offered at American University and taught by Peter DiGiammarino.  These posts and other material from class, including:

  • Work problems,
  • Templates,
  • Graphics,
  • Slide shows, and
  • Assessments

will be offered later this Spring at www.intelliven.com as an interactive digital workbook called Manage to Lead: Seven Truths to Help You Change the World available on the iPad, iPhone, Mac or PC powered by Inkling the leading platform for interactive higher education textbooks. Print and electronic copies will also be available on amazon.com.

Workbook content is searchable and findable on the web using Google. One chapter will be available at no charge and selected chapters may be purchased separately The entire workbook can also be purchased along with appendixes and answers to work problems. Future updates and enhancements will forever be automatically pushed to purchasers at no additional charge.

Selected intelliven.com blog content will soon be available as an interactive digital workbook.

Whether one wants to change personal habits, implement a new information system, improve a business process, get team members to work together, increase a community’s appreciation for diversity, or even to topple a monarchy, taking seven actions driven by seven disarmingly simple truths will individually and collectively help achieve the goal.

Manage to Lead presents a framework to describe and assess any organization. It also provides a structured approach to plan and implement next steps for an organization as it strives for long-term growth and performance.

Readers are invited to select a familiar organization on which to apply the tools and templates introduced throughout the workbook. Exercises in each chapter produce essential elements for the organization’s annual strategic plan and lay the groundwork for implementing that plan.

Readers can package the key elements from Organization Exercises to form a strategic plan that communicates how the organization sees itself and where it is headed. At the end of the year leaders can compare actual results with what was described in the strategic plan to study what happened, why what happened was different than plan, what is to be learned from that, and what to do differently going forward as a result.

Repeat the process over several years and compare actual to planned results year-to-year to see the organization mature, perform, and grow to its full potential.

Why it is important to get off of auto-pilot and how to do it.

Most people find it is hard to connect all nine dots in the figure at left with four straight lines, without retracing any lines, and without lifting their writing implement.

The reason it is hard to do is because in order to solve the puzzle a person has to think and operate in ways that are different than normal; or outside the box, as they say.

Before reading further, follow the instructions to solve the puzzle yourself; first with four lines, and then try to solve it using only three lines.  Finally, try to determine how many ways the puzzle can be solved with Continue reading

How Core Leaders can get clear about what problem their organization solves for whom to get and stay aligned for peak performance.

Core Leaders who all describe the problem their organization solves for whom in the same way are apt to provide more consistent guidance and direction and so increase the odds of better performance across the board.

 

 

To get clear or to test for clarity, invite each Core Leader to:

How to set direction when the leader is not sure about where to head next.

A leader sets direction, aligns resources, and motivates 

Figure 1

action as suggested by the panels presented in Figure 1.  Another way to put it is that a leader develops, holds, nurtures, communicates, and drives to achieve a vision.  As in Figure 2, it helps to think of the leader holding a map, like Harry Potter’s Marauder’s map that is always changing,

Figure 2

making sense of it, and navigating the course with those led looking on.

Wise leaders constantly check with their top team to confirm that they are headed toward the same goals, in the same way, and for the same reasons.  The best leaders are always open to input from their top team to tweak goals and plans along the way.

Clarity starts with the leader.  If the leader is not clear then no one else can be clear.  A leader either:  Continue reading

How to Run a Great Strategic Initiatives Offsite Work Session

Many organizations embrace the need for their leaders to convene offsite, for a day or two, in order to advance their ability to achieve a desired future state and to improve group performance by crystallizing and preparing to launch one or more Strategic Initiative.  The best organizations know that to achieve optimum results such a session is best hosted by a trained outside facilitator and that pre-meeting data collection and preparation are key to success.

What follows is a POAD that has been used hundreds of times Continue reading

How to get clear about what problem an organization solves for whom, how.

All businesses and many, if not most or even all, other organizations ought to get, and stay, crystal clear about whose problem they solve, how.  It is common for leaders to describe their organizations in terms of one or two but not all three dimensions because thinking about the three dimensions of market, problem and solution all at the same time challenges the mind and is hard for most people to do for any length of time.

The following graphic presents a way to visualize an organization in terms of the problem it solves (or why anyone needs what the organization provides), for whom (market), and Continue reading