Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

Whi

How often have you heard of a CEO or manager deciding some or other book is the ultimate tool in direction for his or her business? It’s been books like Tom Peters’ In Search of Excellence, we still are thanks Tom. Execution by Bossidy and Charan, all those executioners sure made a difference. Good to Great by Jim Collins and organizational focused books like Patrick Lencioni’s 5 Dysfunctions of a Team seem to find a slew of managers trying to create programs around them.

Usually they have no idea of the effort it takes to introduce change in an organization. Even if they do have the smallest notion their expectations are way higher than reality!

So what do you do? You’re a manager you just read the most amazing book and the examples were just awesome. You lie back and think how amazing your organization would appear under the framework you so recently read about.

Well the easiest is obviously to give the book to everyone and tell them to get on with it. As an added bonus there are no costs associated with this approach. Potential results to be reaped. Zero. Could even be negative. Your staff may think your have totally lost contact with the real world and never read another thing you pass on or even listen to your thoughts again. Ever.

You could get Millie from accounting to lead everybody in reading a chapter a week over coffee? Maybe not.

Call the author. After all the only reason they wrote the book was to market their services. Now this can be interesting. Some authors are just that. Authors, not consultants. They may have a few friends in consulting they can refer you to.

Contact a few local consultants and see if they can help. Then you discover that it’s going to cost some money to bring about change in your organization and the consultant and his band of brothers and sisters are going to be around for a very long time.

The book only had 280 pages why should I need thirty some odd consultants, pages of deliverables, daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly meetings and even monthly meetings about the monthly meeting. The staff become fazed by all the consultants and their productivity slips. Your customers are starting to leave. The deliverables proclaim you to be outperforming the benchmarks. Some thing just doesn’t feel right?

It isn’t.

There is no simple approach to implementing change in an organization but it doesn’t help that it becomes driven by outsiders. You can develop a change program from inside. Yes, you’ll probably need a consultant or facilitator who has done this type of thing before.

So here’s where to start.

Have a town hall meeting – get everyone together. You may need several meetings depending on how large your organization is. Talk about the business and ask the staff for their ideas. If you want them to read the book let them know it’s the one that got you thinking! Be honest.

Have smaller meetings and gather a few more ideas for improvement. Nothing more. Post the ideas for all to read and comment.

Then break the business into ‘teams’ these could be along functional lines or across functional. Both can work.

Next run a focused session to build a plan for the future. It’s like a strategy session but the whole business is doing it. Now they have all read the earlier notices and thought about the problems they also know what the general goals of the organization are as best they can. They know whats going on in your organization.

My suggestion is develop a series of questions based on the previous years business:

What worked?
What didn’t?
What can we learn from that?
If we changed one thing what would it be?
What values do we strive to live by?
What functional activities are carried out by this team?
Is one more important to our success than any other for next year?
Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

Whil

t on with it. As an added bonus there are no costs associated with this approach. Potential results to be reaped. Zero. Could even be negative. Your staff may think your have totally lost contact with the real world and never read another thing you pass on or even listen to your thoughts again. Ever.

You could get Millie from accounting to lead everybody in reading a chapter a week over coffee? Maybe not.

Call the author. After all the only reason they wrote the book was to market their services. Now this can be interesting. Some authors are just that. Authors, not consultants. They may have a few friends in consulting they can refer you to.

Contact a few local consultants and see if they can help. Then you discover that it’s going to cost some money to bring about change in your organization and the consultant and his band of brothers and sisters are going to be around for a very long time.

The book only had 280 pages why should I need thirty some odd consultants, pages of deliverables, daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly meetings and even monthly meetings about the monthly meeting. The staff become fazed by all the consultants and their productivity slips. Your customers are starting to leave. The deliverables proclaim you to be outperforming the benchmarks. Some thing just doesn’t feel right?

It isn’t.

There is no simple approach to implementing change in an organization but it doesn’t help that it becomes driven by outsiders. You can develop a change program from inside. Yes, you’ll probably need a consultant or facilitator who has done this type of thing before.

So here’s where to start.

Have a town hall meeting – get everyone together. You may need several meetings depending on how large your organization is. Talk about the business and ask the staff for their ideas. If you want them to read the book let them know it’s the one that got you thinking! Be honest.

Have smaller meetings and gather a few more ideas for improvement. Nothing more. Post the ideas for all to read and comment.

Then break the business into ‘teams’ these could be along functional lines or across functional. Both can work.

Next run a focused session to build a plan for the future. It’s like a strategy session but the whole business is doing it. Now they have all read the earlier notices and thought about the problems they also know what the general goals of the organization are as best they can. They know whats going on in your organization.

My suggestion is develop a series of questions based on the previous years business:

What worked?
What didn’t?
What can we learn from that?
If we changed one thing what would it be?
What values do we strive to live by?
What functional activities are carried out by this team?
Is one more important to our success than any other for next year?
Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

Whi

d thirty some odd consultants, pages of deliverables, daily meetings, weekly meetings, monthly meetings and even monthly meetings about the monthly meeting. The staff become fazed by all the consultants and their productivity slips. Your customers are starting to leave. The deliverables proclaim you to be outperforming the benchmarks. Some thing just doesn’t feel right?

It isn’t.

There is no simple approach to implementing change in an organization but it doesn’t help that it becomes driven by outsiders. You can develop a change program from inside. Yes, you’ll probably need a consultant or facilitator who has done this type of thing before.

So here’s where to start.

Have a town hall meeting – get everyone together. You may need several meetings depending on how large your organization is. Talk about the business and ask the staff for their ideas. If you want them to read the book let them know it’s the one that got you thinking! Be honest.

Have smaller meetings and gather a few more ideas for improvement. Nothing more. Post the ideas for all to read and comment.

Then break the business into ‘teams’ these could be along functional lines or across functional. Both can work.

Next run a focused session to build a plan for the future. It’s like a strategy session but the whole business is doing it. Now they have all read the earlier notices and thought about the problems they also know what the general goals of the organization are as best they can. They know whats going on in your organization.

My suggestion is develop a series of questions based on the previous years business:

What worked?
What didn’t?
What can we learn from that?
If we changed one thing what would it be?
What values do we strive to live by?
What functional activities are carried out by this team?
Is one more important to our success than any other for next year?
Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

Whi

est.

Have smaller meetings and gather a few more ideas for improvement. Nothing more. Post the ideas for all to read and comment.

Then break the business into ‘teams’ these could be along functional lines or across functional. Both can work.

Next run a focused session to build a plan for the future. It’s like a strategy session but the whole business is doing it. Now they have all read the earlier notices and thought about the problems they also know what the general goals of the organization are as best they can. They know whats going on in your organization.

My suggestion is develop a series of questions based on the previous years business:

What worked?
What didn’t?
What can we learn from that?
If we changed one thing what would it be?
What values do we strive to live by?
What functional activities are carried out by this team?
Is one more important to our success than any other for next year?
Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

Whi

Split into small activity or role groups
List typical goals for each activity – (SMART goals)
Back in one group
Select only your top ten goals, choose a Champion for each
Develop a plan to achieve each one – manage this for the year on a weekly, and monthly basis

If you can get your business broken down into teams and working their own goals to reach organizational objectives. Some results will surprise you how quickly they can happen! Others will take a while, like a year for the result to be recognized. You will be writing your own book.

“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”

This approach is essentially the approach Jack Welch and his MIT guys developed and called “Work-Out” It took GE to a value of over $500B. It works and it can work for you without the expense of the MIT guys!

While this can be done in house it would probably be best facilitated by a professional.

You can transform an organization but it's the realm of experienced people who implement it.

Make your next year rock!