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Tag Archive for: competencies

DAVE NORTON IN SEPTEMBER – MAKING STRATEGY A CORE STATE OF THE ART COMPETENCE

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create value                                                                  Dave Norton says,  

“Behind every story of shareholder value, there is another story of value creation. That is the real story of strategy execution.”

Having had the privilege today to proof read the delegate materials for the upcoming Dave Norton Progress Conference on the 11th September, I cannot resist offering a little sneak preview of the 100 plus slides he has prepared for his South African audience.

In essence, he says, strategy must be a core competence and his presentation shows you precisely what you need to accomplish to make it a core state of the art competence. You can be assured of rich content with case studies and real life applications relevant to both the Private and Public sectors. His content flows seamlessly, offering delegates a deliberate journey through which they can contextualise their strategy execution efforts. And behind every success he shares with you he also tells the story of how the value was created.

THE STRATEGY MANAGEMENT VACUUM

First and foremost he will show how management systems have STILL not changed to keep up with the way the world has changed.  This is what he calls a Strategy Management Vacuum. He goes on to reveal his research into why strategies continue to fail and offer solutions to overcome this sadly, prevalent reality.

MAKING INTANGIBLE TANGIBLE

I was fascinated by his take on intangible assets and how describing your strategy begins by understanding the value the intangibles offer. He cites Apple, General Electric, IBM and others and will illustrate how Tom Stewart’s thinking in respect of how knowledge that exists in an organisation creates differential advantage. Dave remarks, “A good strategy focusses on the processes and people that have greatest impact on customer satisfaction.”

CLOSING THE STRATEGIC PERFORMANCE GAP WITH CAUSE AND EFFECT LOGIC

Dave has prepared a prolific set of strategy maps, scorecards and themes that have been applied within leading organisations. He asserts that your strategic theme is critical to create change and value.

“Intangible assets are bundled”, he says. “One initiative is not enough to execute strategy. You require a portfolio of several initiatives that are interdependent and cannot be treated on a stand- alone basis.” And again, he provides real management tools to show you how to include specific ways to define your strategic architecture, create robust strategy maps and tailor relevant strategy themes. In particular he provides delegates with specific Balanced Scorecards to show how they consistently fill the strategy management vacuum

LEADERSHIP IMPERATIVES FOR EFFECTIVE STRATEGY EXECUTION

Dave also says, “It is not a simple process for a CEO to mobilize transformation.” But his content goes on to provide tried and tested leadership essentials for certain success. He shows what is required in terms of left and right brain thinking to build your effective strategy management systems and why leadership issues are most often the dominant barrier to effective strategy execution. Just one barrier cited is how politics, in 89% of cases, is the major factor that prohibits the successful execution of strategy. Enter Dave’s right brain change management techniques and priorities, with ways to break down silos, get politics out of the way and cascade the strategy and scorecards to all key executives, business units and departments with appropriate accountability.

What follows on from there are the left brain change management tools that he has observed and that have been shown to achieve desired results.

MAKING STRATEGY EVERYONE’S JOB

Dave illustrates how Hilton Hotels did just this by linking their Balanced Scorecard to education, personal goals, incentive compensation and communication. Looking forward to how he will unpack this for us on the day.

SETTING TARGETS & FUNDING THE STRATEGY

Be prepared for prolific content and techniques to define your measures and targets and determine adequate funding.

SUCCESSFUL HUMAN CAPITAL DEVELOPMENT ATTRIBUTES

An annual survey of CEO’s Presidents and Chairman showed that Human Capital Development is the most important issue facing senior management. “People driven strategies counter slow markets and economic conditions. The Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame shows that successful strategy execution begins with Human Capital Development”, he says. And then goes on to share the results of Public & Private sector results whilst showing you which are the key Human Capital Value Multipliers. He will also show us how to develop competency profiles for each essential strategic job family and in particular how to determine the gaps between individual and group level.

THE CHERRY ON THE TOP: BUILDING YOUR EFFECTIVE OFFICE OF STRATEGY MANAGEMENT: THE EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS

As he insists that strategy is a core competence and that managing strategy is a whole new ball game very different to managing functions, he will show you why new organisation approaches are needed to facilitate cross-functional alignment. He defines the responsibilities of the office of strategy management and suggests the best practices in terms of conducting your meetings and reviews to keep your strategy on course including frequency and structure.

This blog barely scratches the surface or even does justice to what Dave Norton has in store for delegates on the 11th September, but hopefully provides you with some ideas to provoke and challenge your thinking in respect of your strategy execution efforts.

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Dr David Norton is the co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard and leading global practitioner in applying the Balanced Scorecard in both the Private and Public Sector. Together with Professor Robert Kaplan, he has been acclaimed by Harvard Business Review for his significant contribution to the management profession in the past 75 years. More recently Thinkers 50 have ranked them in their Hall of Fame alongside Tom Peters, Kenichi Ohmae, Warren Bennis, Howard Gardner, Henry Mintzberg, Charles Handy, Philip Kotler and Ikujiro Nonaka for their mammoth contribution to business management and leadership.

On the 11th September 2014 Dr Norton will present a full day seminar in Johannesburg on EXECUTING STRATEGY IN A NEW ECONOMY – Balanced Scorecard Essentials.

HR hopes for 2014

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 By
Dave Ulrich

 

Which of your three children do you love the most or your six grandchildren?  I was recently asked this by a sincere, but oblivious person we met.  I love all my children and grandchildren equally.  Likewise, it is nearly impossible to say “which of your themes for HR 2014 is THE most important?”   I think many of the ideas are relevant, so I will offer a menu of HR hopes for 2014.
  •  HR outside in.  Most HR work still focuses inside the company on employees, leaders, or HR practices.  When the work of HR starts with customers, investors, and communities, it focuses on the value HR can create over time.  Strategic HR still often uses strategy as a mirror to which HR must respond, while outside in uses strategy as a window to external business conditions and key stakeholders to which HR must respond.  HR responds to outside in pressures by making changes in talent, leadership, and capability.
  • Talent.  In the last 20 years, we have learned to help employees become more competent with innovations in training, then we focused on behavioral engagement.  Now, I hope we are focused on emotional engagement where employees find a sense of meaning and purpose from the work they do.  Creating meaning from work comes when employees’ personal strengths and values are used to help and serve others.  Building on your strengths so that they will strengthen others goes beyond a narcissistic view of personal growth.  Meaning is less about one’s personal values and more about how those values create value for others.
  • Leadership.  We often celebrate great leaders whose charisma and stature charms and motives us.  But great leaders go away and have to be replaced by other leaders.  Focusing on individual leaders should shift to collective leadership where leaders at all levels of an organization do the right things in the right way.  This means that individual leaders will be more accountable for developing other leaders than merely getting their way or getting things right.  Good parents want their children to be better than them.  The same with leaders who want the next generation leadership to be better.  And, to be better requires focusing more on external conditions than internal history.  These external conditions might include general social, technical, economic, political, environmental, and demographic trends as well as expectations of specific stakeholders (e.g., customers, investors, and communities).  When leaders turn external expectations of a firm into internal leadership actions and organization practices, they create a leadership brand.  We found in our research among SME’s in Asia (Talent Accelerator) that leaders who attend the leadership have high impact.
  • Capability.  An organization’s capability represents what it is known for, and good at, both inside and outside the company.  A firm’s brand becomes its culture when external expectations turn into internal actions.  A litany of capabilities have been popular over the decades (quality and its derivatives, service and customer connection, innovation, efficiency).  In 2014 and beyond, I envision a few emerging capabilities that HR professionals should architect for their firms.  Simplicity has become important as the world becomes more complex.  Sometimes HR practices like performance management are avoided because they are too complex or process driven.  Terms like essence, minimalist, streamlined, focused are the themes of simplicity.  Information captures a wide range of current fads:  cloud, data, analytics, workforce planning, metrics, scorecard, and so forth.  Behind each of these HR fads is the fundamental capability of information.  As a capability, information is less about data and more about decision making; less about information and more about insight and impact.  HR needs to be very clear about what choices can be made to help an organization win through talent, leadership, and culture, then define choices and collect data to make informed choices.  Collaboration includes teamwork and working across boundaries inside the organization and forming partnerships outside the organization.   HR professionals need to model, learn, and teach principles of simplicity, information, and collaboration.

There it is … a few ideas on a menu for 2014.  Hard to say which one menu item matters most since all are important for HR to fully deliver value.

Written by Professor Dave Ulrich, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan Partner, the RBL Group