When most people hear the phrase “organizational politics,” they react very negatively. They see politics in the workplace as forming clicks and another way to keep those who go against the status quo labeled as an outsider. People also think that it’s a toxic dynamic that allows manipulative behaviors for people to get what they want by stepping on their co-workers' backs. But not every instance of workplace politicking is a selfish maneuver to win.
In his book, Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics (Book Surge, 2007), U.S. Marine turned business professional and university instructor Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts takes you inside one of the greatest team building organizations in the world – the United States Marine Corps – to examine and discover the strategies that business leaders must be willing to learn, use and employ for building ordinary groups into extraordinary teams; leading the right team of commandos who understand what it takes to win on the business battlefield and defeat workplace politics using warfare as the key to experience a significant win. He defines workplace and office politics as “the path to smart growth…using the power to accelerate the careers of high potential future leaders and teams power in the workplace.” He implies that office politics are not always negative, but offer opportunities for greatness. And while workplace politics aren't necessarily avoidable, people can learn to understand their purpose, find their voice and understand how-to strengthen and build the teams dynamics and interpersonal communications skills – all while managing responsibilities with tact, poise, and polish. The game of politics, when understood how-to use it as a strategic weapon, helps to successfully chart the path of personal and professional growth as the essential task to achieve personal mastery from the results of peak performance. Organizational politics also offers the hidden treasures that allow people to stand-out from the crowd. They learn to demonstrate their ability to navigate the maze of successful team building – a task that is viewed as positive organizational behavior from the individual that is perceived as an extraordinary leader. This is the type of person that others seek to follow and emulate for the greatness they wish to develop for themselves.
Workplace Politics vs. The Battlefield Engagement
Just as in any military engagement, in order to win one must know the rules better than his/her competitor to outsmart them on the battlefield. It also is beneficial to be a part of the right team for controlling the elements of the battlefront. However, some might claim the workplace and the military are very different in many ways. Thinking from this approach causes significant missteps in organizational politics. There are significant issues that are similar in the workplace and on a military battlefield. For starters, the one constant is “people.” Any time that people are involved in a scenario, decision-making must play a role in the ability to win. Using the strategies from the United States Marine Corps, people are responsible for making critical decisions from the highest ranking officer down to the lowest ranking enlisted – and the decision could mean life or death. Well, the same goes for the workplace. People are responsible for making critical decisions that could mean that the organization acquires strategic assets (executive suite decisions) or that a customer is treated in a way that causes them to continue doing business with the organization. Both can be seen as life or death for the organization. As seen with Wachovia bank, a decision from the top level leadership was made to acquire Westgate Financial to boost their mortgage business. When the U.S. mortgage markets and industry imploded during the financial crisis, the organization was effected with incredible implications – it became the beginning of the end for one of the country’s largest banks and people lost careers and more. Similar to the likes of a military battlefield engagement and a series of wrong decisions made by leadership, loss of life was experienced.
But what most people fail to realize is that the workplace is too a battlefield. Business is warfare and those who understand how to navigate the politics always win. Consider the game of chess. Chess can be low-key and quiet, a friendly game between friends. Or it can be explosive and highly competitive, set amid a crowd of observers, where the ultimate winner reaps world-wide accolades. Consider the skill behind the game of chess. It requires well-planned strategy and a great deal of mental acuity and patience, not to mention years of practice to reach an elite status.
These are the same skills required by a great leader, one who has the ability to guide an organization and one who understands the world of workplace politics. On the other hand, while playing a game such as chess, there can only be a single winner where there often can be a more neutral outcome in the world of workplace politics. With the proper skills of negotiation and influence, savvy leadership might be able to create a win-win situation.
The Truth about Politics in the Workplace
Politics will always be part of an organization because people are people. The dynamic relationships of individuals who run a business enterprise play an important part in how the business operates: How the mission map, posture statements, vision, values and organizational culture is forged. And while the average Jane or Joe might feel like they are being run over by co-workers who manipulate the system, bully, gossip, backstab and brown nose to get what they want, there is more to workplace politics than those negative daily encounters. The quintessential aspect of organizational politics is the team. Building great teams’ hits at one of the most discussed topics in business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, transformational leadership, organizational renewal and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today’s business arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team units that consistently produce extraordinary outcomes from their performance. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives.
Good leaders are a thing of the past, as global economies now require more than good – they seek greatness and ordinary just does not fit the bill any longer. They now require the ordinary to be “extraordinary.” The new battlefield in the workplace requires the extraordinary leaders’ understanding of workplace politics and the accompanying landscape to be significant. They can no longer work in the old silos of the past that was developed by the silly political conflicts. No, these extraordinary leaders can no longer exhibit the behaviors that ultimately invite disaster. This is not to say that leaders of the past demonstrated the behaviors that put-up with negative politics that caused disastrous outcomes nor does it imply every good leader has found his/her way to the top of the heap by climbing over the bodies of crushed co-workers. It simply means that leadership understands workplace politics well enough to use them as “strategic weapons” to produce positive returns without the mud slinging and backsliding of unethical and immoral actions.
Understanding how-to chart the path of organizational politics means being able to maneuver using political warfare to enhance the organization's ability to rise to the top of its industry, without leaving one of its warriors lying wounded on the battlefield. It means having a well crafted Battleplan, understanding the players, building positive alliances and coalition of forces, using the art of war as a significant warfighting strategy that all stakeholders understand and buy-in to for winning, and finally, developing a compelling case study for the associates of the organization to understand the comprehensive approach for integrating strategic human capital and team development initiatives into the fold.
Convert Uniqueness into Ultimate Power
The best leaders are the people that understand the nature of warfare in dealing with and overcoming workplace politics. These are the men and women who have a tone on the pulse of the workplace – internal and external – and know what it takes to remain on task “ethically” to lead others into greatness. Here are five important things to know about politically savvy leaders:
° They understand the critical importance of the team associates to be “LeaderShaped” into GREATNESS. They understand the “what” and “how” in developing a GREAT team.
° They make decisive decisions for the benefit of the Future Picture
° They understand the “culture” in the system that the team must influence.
° They know what it take to strategically “execute” and win as a team.
° They know how-to use the “Six Political Signs of Business Leadership” to achieve professional mastery to the people and organization: 1. a clear “Vision” of issues. 2. Understand the “Value” drivers within the team. 3. “Behavioral” influence of leadership to the Future Picture. 4. “Strategy” Modeling (Enterprise Decision Making). 5. Strategic “Execution” (Governance). 6. “Duplication of Protocol” (learnable-teachable methods for future engagements).
Engaging the battlefield that is influenced by workplace politics, for many, may mean asserting their power, pushing and shoving like the elementary school bully until they get what they want. But that's really just the toxic behavior and conduct that eliminates the possibilities for leadership and the organization they influence to win. One of the best ways to lose power is to overtly use it. Instead, the best leaders know that power comes from influence – and influence is subjective to behavior, character and the value system that drives the people responsible for charting the pathway.
In this great read, Pitts also outlines how, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naïve to the complexities of team dynamics. He outlines the strategic-execution methods that smart leaders understand and use to determine what type of team model best suits their specific environment, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.
Author Robert Dilenschneider explains in his book, Power and Influence: The Rules Have Changed: True power and influence means accepting responsibility, taking the heat and keeping your word. So even if someone supports the supposition that leadership is just another way of playing political games, it doesn’t necessarily mean this is a bad thing. When properly played, workplace politics can lead to great achievements and outcomes. Pitts believes that extraordinary teams that are great engage politics well. They are LeaderShaped and driven by extraordinary people who make a distinctive impact – they deliver significant and superior performance over a long period of time. There are some striking characteristics of great teams who achieve sustained success within their mission across its life cycle. They experience an increased level of professional mastery in developing and executing as great teams do. These teams have gone through a process; a process that is forged in a furnace of professional development, transformational thinking, and strategic-execution.
Workplace politics, good or evil, are a very real part of the work environment. Whether people subscribe to the belief that leadership is just another way of engaging the political battlefield or not, it is important to keep in mind that as long as there are people working together as great teams do, there will be politics, but the outcomes will be far different from the results of the past. Great teams are the way to successfully engage the battlefield – greatness from the team is how to engage politics well and win it using fair tactics.
For additional information, please email Dpitts@thebisongroup.com.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Front Line Leadership that Builds GREAT Teams
So, a team is what you are hoping to build? But, what kind of team? A team who uses the academic approach to getting things done or one that brings real-world experience to the situation at hand? What criteria, then, do you use for choosing your teammates? Team building programs during the late 80's and throughout the 90's took place in the woods at the height of the now infamous ropes courses. These courses were designed to engage organizational groups in a series of team activities that voluntarily made people face self-imposed limitations while hanging from trees and cables. The next decade lead the way for classroom-based team building sessions that included behavioral profiles and performance assessments, such as the universal language of DISC and its model, along with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.
To answer the questions in the opening of this text, we feel that organizations must build and develop the "GREAT" team. Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today's corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior officials within team environments that are lead by great initiatives. They must be committed to draft and manage the right team - a GREAT team - of commandos to lead the effort.
As we look forward to the next generation of team building programs, people will be coming out of the woods, out of the classrooms, and out of the convention centers. The question then is: Where will they be going? The answer; they'll be headed to learning environments with a sensory-rich atmosphere that enhances military training and simulation as the team building practices that increasingly requires experienced quality from the battlefield, in business, and across industry.
In April 2005, the Wharton School of Business students, staff, and sponsors traveled to the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia to learn what they were really made of. The venture, aptly titled "Learning Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Complexity," sought to expose the future business leaders of the world, to the types of training exercises that have produced generations of successful military leaders. While there are obvious differences between battlefield leadership and corporate leadership, there are also many parallels that can be drawn - especially in the constantly evolving business landscape. We could be nimbler in our decision-making. We could be team players, even from the top. We could lead by example. And we could actively train our subordinates to eventually lead us. Sounds like hogwash? Don't forget that the U.S. Marines has a proven track record - 233 years and running. And by the way, this program at the Wharton School of Business lives on today.
Just as in the experiences at the Wharton School, live training continues to evolve from the military training paradigm toward new solutions that prepare warfighters (the title given to associates that are a part of a GREAT team environment) to fight against asymmetric enemies often embedded in civilian populations and organizations. Since 2005, the Bison Group has invested substantially in new live training solutions to counter challenges faced in the business marketplace, specifically Military Operations Counter-IED Devices: Decision-making, collective behaviors, and cultural influences.
However, the heavy financial burden of the U.S. economy, another form of conflict, "Domestic War on Terror (DWOT)," has taken valuable resources away from future planned training and simulation and instead toward extending the life cycle of organizations in trouble. Therefore, industries are being forced to deliver temporary solutions for less instead of future-oriented growth strategies. Future-oriented growth strategies for teams are designed to increase capacity to the individual and organizational system and building GREAT teams using military strategy and tactics that provide proven solutions where people and organizations achieve high levels of performance.
One way of ensuring that GREAT teams are developed for such a task lies in the adoption of “Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams;” a high impact and hands-on curriculum that demonstrates how-to use the “Six Lenses of Innovation” for teams, also known as the “Preemptive Strike” measures: (1) Establish Achievable Aims; challenge deeply-held orthodoxies about who their customers are, how they interact with them, how they define their products or services, how they configure the value chain, and so on; (2) Identify Means; harness emergent trends and discontinuities to substantially change the way things are done in their industry; (3) Ensure Intelligence; leverage core competencies and strategic assets in novel ways to generate new growth; (4) Enforce Security; understand and address deep customer needs that are currently going unmet; (5) Engage the Strike; a deliberate Battleplan used by a strategic and numerically inferior power to head off a situation in which ultimate defeat would be inevitable; and lastly, (6) Flawlessly Execute the Exit Strategy; just as everything has a beginning, all things have an end. Leaders are instructed how-to establish exit points using 32 solution-centric precepts to face fierce challenges in short time frames using the process.
Team building programs, like this Next Generation program, are the start of a team development revolution and your team should follow close by. Don't consider becoming a GREAT team, simply learn to transform into one!
To learn more about Building GREAT teams using Business WARFIGHTING strategies, visit www.thebisongroup.com or email the author at: Dpitts@thebisongroup.com.
To answer the questions in the opening of this text, we feel that organizations must build and develop the "GREAT" team. Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today's corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior officials within team environments that are lead by great initiatives. They must be committed to draft and manage the right team - a GREAT team - of commandos to lead the effort.
As we look forward to the next generation of team building programs, people will be coming out of the woods, out of the classrooms, and out of the convention centers. The question then is: Where will they be going? The answer; they'll be headed to learning environments with a sensory-rich atmosphere that enhances military training and simulation as the team building practices that increasingly requires experienced quality from the battlefield, in business, and across industry.
In April 2005, the Wharton School of Business students, staff, and sponsors traveled to the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia to learn what they were really made of. The venture, aptly titled "Learning Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Complexity," sought to expose the future business leaders of the world, to the types of training exercises that have produced generations of successful military leaders. While there are obvious differences between battlefield leadership and corporate leadership, there are also many parallels that can be drawn - especially in the constantly evolving business landscape. We could be nimbler in our decision-making. We could be team players, even from the top. We could lead by example. And we could actively train our subordinates to eventually lead us. Sounds like hogwash? Don't forget that the U.S. Marines has a proven track record - 233 years and running. And by the way, this program at the Wharton School of Business lives on today.
Just as in the experiences at the Wharton School, live training continues to evolve from the military training paradigm toward new solutions that prepare warfighters (the title given to associates that are a part of a GREAT team environment) to fight against asymmetric enemies often embedded in civilian populations and organizations. Since 2005, the Bison Group has invested substantially in new live training solutions to counter challenges faced in the business marketplace, specifically Military Operations Counter-IED Devices: Decision-making, collective behaviors, and cultural influences.
However, the heavy financial burden of the U.S. economy, another form of conflict, "Domestic War on Terror (DWOT)," has taken valuable resources away from future planned training and simulation and instead toward extending the life cycle of organizations in trouble. Therefore, industries are being forced to deliver temporary solutions for less instead of future-oriented growth strategies. Future-oriented growth strategies for teams are designed to increase capacity to the individual and organizational system and building GREAT teams using military strategy and tactics that provide proven solutions where people and organizations achieve high levels of performance.
One way of ensuring that GREAT teams are developed for such a task lies in the adoption of “Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams;” a high impact and hands-on curriculum that demonstrates how-to use the “Six Lenses of Innovation” for teams, also known as the “Preemptive Strike” measures: (1) Establish Achievable Aims; challenge deeply-held orthodoxies about who their customers are, how they interact with them, how they define their products or services, how they configure the value chain, and so on; (2) Identify Means; harness emergent trends and discontinuities to substantially change the way things are done in their industry; (3) Ensure Intelligence; leverage core competencies and strategic assets in novel ways to generate new growth; (4) Enforce Security; understand and address deep customer needs that are currently going unmet; (5) Engage the Strike; a deliberate Battleplan used by a strategic and numerically inferior power to head off a situation in which ultimate defeat would be inevitable; and lastly, (6) Flawlessly Execute the Exit Strategy; just as everything has a beginning, all things have an end. Leaders are instructed how-to establish exit points using 32 solution-centric precepts to face fierce challenges in short time frames using the process.
Team building programs, like this Next Generation program, are the start of a team development revolution and your team should follow close by. Don't consider becoming a GREAT team, simply learn to transform into one!
To learn more about Building GREAT teams using Business WARFIGHTING strategies, visit www.thebisongroup.com or email the author at: Dpitts@thebisongroup.com.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
The “War Room” – When Innovation Intersects Strategy
There are three ways to react to an organizational crisis. One way is to turn your head to ignore the situation and hope that it will fix itself (best of luck!). Another way is to run around in a panic-induced cost-cutting frenzy that could seriously impair the organization’s long-term growth potential and future state. The third and, of course, smartest method is to recognize the impending threat to both your top and bottom line, and quickly adapt the organization’s strategic outlook and business model to the new environmental conditions. So, the question to answer is this: “what are the decision makers within your organization currently doing? Are they connecting the organization’s strategy with its innovative approach to meet a successful Future Picture?” But what if you, as the leader, are having a difficult struggle to influence others to your point of view and get them to rethinking and reinventing the organization’s strategy forward as circumstances and economics rapidly change. If you are experiencing this challenge, here’s some advice to help your people to win the battlefield of transition.
I have continued to state enthusiastically over the last few years that, in a world where the pace of change has gone hypercritical, today’s most important race is the race for transformational leadership and organizational renewal. It is the race to change as fast as the environment is changing around you; the race to influence positive organizational behaviors and the race to reinvent your strategy and your business model before they become obsolete. When the economy is in a state in flux, most organizations tend to postpone their professional development efforts and favor cost cutting as the strategy that will preserve the future. This is a grave mistake that will affect the future of the organization in ways that will likely kill the very spirit the leadership teams are hoping to preserve. Their efforts during the challenging times will only prolong the inevitable; ultimate demise once the current crisis is diminished. The lesson here is this; a successful business model will break almost overnight when the waves of the ocean start crashing against the pillars of the pier if leadership does not remain on a continuous, yet discontinuous approach to train the organization’s greatest asset – the people.
So what exactly is Strategic Organizational Renewal (SOR)?
Organizations undergo change to enhance their productivity. Changes can be effected in several areas of the organization including culture, strategy, mission, teams and organizational structure. SOR is a framework that defines the role, responsibilities, and performance of human capital across the organization and the planning for it must only take place in the organizations “war room.” To explain the war room concept, leadership appoints a specific room that will be specified as the location where the organizations strategy is planned. This location must remain under lock and key to ensure the organization’s intellectual capital offers an uncompromised agenda that influences positive outcomes. SOR is the resulting effect that is birthed from the war room. This is only possible when those appointed to the war room each understands the importance of establishing the organization’s “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) – the principles to achieve professional mastery.
Establishing Principles to Achieve Personal Mastery – People First, then the Organization
You now have before you the opportunity to take the steps that achieve a high level of professional mastery that achieves organizational growth. It requires the adoption of a “code” as a living, breathing organism to each level of the organization. How can people build awareness, use their experiences to implement a new approach to deportment and develop a strategy, which includes resolve and ethical conduct? This is the task that lies before them.
It sounds like the normal work that we all know and do so well. But be cautioned, it is not! When individuals combine the code with rules and regulations, reporting and accountability to force conformity to standards, they will fail – to oppose change by way of fear is not what is required. Rather, achieving professional mastery is a continuous pursuit of ethical behavior that ultimately manifests into a quest of improving the human spirit; to pursue good, to do the right thing in across the workplace. The code says that who ever should adopt it into his/her life, will possess a level of courage – both physically and emotionally – to execute the necessary task that drives performance to exemplify the highest level of personal and professional conviction.
Why establish a code to live by? The answer is simple; establishing a code or set of principles ensures a level of conduct (code of conduct) that extends the life cycle of the organization. This code of conduct is what I have been referencing – the “Memorandum of Understanding.” As a code of conduct, the MOU provides a resource to assist people in their personal development, growth, guidance, and assessment in the leadership of self. The MOU establishes a strict perspective for instructing successful practices, theories, and beliefs that drives people to achieve a successful future (how you intend to conduct yourself into the future for others to emulate).
The Memorandum of Understanding is also designed for people to learn broadly; to inspire the service out of generosity for others; and to prepare them to lead systems courageously into the future. A MOU must encourage a perspective to become firmly grounded in the potential for successful growth using the following constructs:
- The Cardinal Rules
- The Guiding Precepts
- The Forms of Disposition
- The General Orders
- The Strategy Forward – Establishing Professional Mastery
- The Centers of Gravity
The Cardinal Rules. The Cardinal Rules are a set of guidelines that are invaluable for people and organizations to follow while planning and executing at the strategic or tactical level. These rules, once established by the individual(s) or teams are the rules that govern forward movement and must not change.
The Guiding Precepts. The Guiding Precepts are designed to inform people what they should and should not be doing in accordance with executing a well designed strategy to win. They also inform of the reasons “why” an action must occur and the repercussions should the individual and/or organization fail at meeting such a task.
The Forms of Disposition. The Forms of Disposition offer a substantive transformation in “thought” about how people achieve a perspective on things in life. It refers to an orchestrated, systemic and revolutionary new world-view resulting in a “change” of societies, cultures, and marketplaces due to behavioral perspective. This is today often called "systems theory," which sees a web of relationships coalescing to become something greater than the parts. Individuals must be able to look at things from a perspective that they are always changing and evolving into new forms – thinking “out-of-the-box!” We are doomed to a slow death unless radical change occurs in the way we think. Change your way of thinking or die a slow death.
The General Orders. The General Orders are broad, community-wide "need statements,” designed to encompass a variety of related issues in a person’s life or within the life cycle of an organization. These related issues are referred to as “Guiding Objectives,” which are specific items that need to be addressed. The Guiding Strategies (developed to fit current and future circumstance) are the methods identified for addressing the Guiding Objectives, and the Guiding Policies are the specific action steps that are recommended to implement the Guiding Strategies. The General Orders, all eleven of them, offer the ability to explore implications in an open and reflective manner and reinforce each other in providing a coherency and wholeness often lacking in life cycles.
The Strategy Forward – Establishing Professional Mastery. The traditional values are the foundation of the modern day; that was yesterday. Tomorrow, you have an opportunity to create commitment and the needed momentum to establish, publish, share, and teach a different set of life’s code, values, and ethics to journey into the future. After much hard work, you are prepared to develop a strategy to move forward and plan the next steps to target critical successes for winning the Future Picture. What a legacy you will leave when executed with personal and professional bearing for others to follow. This is the way of the future. This is a new chapter!
The Centers of Gravity. Just as time changes, so does the internal and external influence in your life and in the life cycle of an organization. The Centers of Gravity are the dynamics within a process that offer the greatest impact on the overall system when change happens. They offer a high level of “value” and return on your energy “investment.” When combined with the concept of parallel deposits (creating energy from various perspectives in a short period of time), the Centers of Gravity make possible the seemingly impossible task of realizing success in changing paradigms. The Centers of Gravity places significant influence on the five established epicenters of any changing system to receive desired effects: Leadership, Processes, Infrastructure, Population, and Action Units.
In summary, I see the Memorandum of Understanding (once established for the organization), as an opportunity to free up the actions of people as servants, but develop them as encouraged opportunists. It is empowering, it is enabling, and it grounds people in a public way on the fundamentals that they all must share to benefit the organization. There is no ethical malaise. It is important to realize that the new is not a finding from what has been lost. Rather, it is like the journey of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz in search of a brain (brain power in this context), the tin man in search of a heart, and the lion in search of courage. People’s value system is intact and in most cases, has been during the journey of personal growth. The MOU simply articulates and reaffirms the core value and behavioral perspective that already underlie their personal and professional appearance and conduct to achieve significant growth. And, all of this is stimulated from the affects of the war room; hence, the influences that lead to significant strategic organizational renewal in the end.
The Memorandum of Understanding is designed to help an organization answer four fundamental questions in order to develop and execute an effective strategy forward plan. These questions are:
- Where does the organization want to be in the future?
- What will the organization apply its resources against to achieve the Future Picture?
- How will the organization apply those resources?
- When and under what conditions will the organization exit from their current strategic plan?
It’s the act of dynamically adjusting business models and strategies to the deep changes at work in the external environment. Above all else, this requires innovation and the Memorandum of Understanding definitely offers an innovative perspective to most organizations. In a 2003 article in Harvard Business Review entitled “The Quest for Resilience,” Gary Hamel wrote, “Strategic renewal is creative reconstruction.” It’s all about dissecting the traditional business model and examining it for imaginative ways to reconstruct it to create significant intellectual and emotional thought space for value creation to positively influence the internal and external customers of the organization. This becomes all the more urgent in challenging times, when customer needs and market conditions swiftly and dramatically change.
As in the case of the New Covenant Church of Philadelphia organization, where the senior pastor and Chief Executive Officer Bishop C. Milton Grannum, set aside a specific room on the same floor of the building as his office for directing the organization’s strategic organizational renewal efforts. The organization’s new “war room” had the same critical importance as Winston Churchill’s cabinet war room in London, used to direct military strategy during World War II. Bishop Grannum’s Innovation War Room was a simple, but highly effective device that guided the New Covenant Church of Philadelphia’s appointed leadership team to focus on establishing the strategy forward to reinvent the business model and find bold, new growth opportunities. And, its impact on the organization’s strategies – and, ultimately, its performance – is still being felt today.
Late in the month of November 2008, even in the face of formidable pressures and economic challenges, New Covenant Church of Philadelphia braved the climate and made the decision to bring in yet another trainer, speaker and author Dr. David Ireland from the region only to learn that they were on the right path to extend the organization’s life cycle. The New Covenant Church of Philadelphia continues to be one of the most progressive thinking faith-based organizations in the region.
The reason; the CEO fully understands that the time to input integrated talent management to boost the organization’s human capital is when most organizations are calling on “cost cutting” as its strategy in the face of adverse conditions.
Very few organizations, for-profit and not-for-profit, can claim to have a specific innovation war room somewhere on location. But, what every organization can and should do – right now! – is organize a serious, high-level strategy forum (at least call it the “Innovation War Room” where innovation intersects strategy) to begin exercising transformative thinking and rethinking their business from the customer backward.
One of the fundamental questions the leadership team must ask is this: “how do we get the people to buy-into the organization’s new perspective of transformational thinking to experience upward movement in a market where people no longer have financial resources?” And, in a nutshell, it is my perspective that in answering the question, these people should take a look at the slogan of Royal Bank of Scotland: “Less Talk!” “Start engaging the necessary requirements to strategically execute flawlessly to influence the organizations Future Picture.” Innovation powers us out of everything and must be taken seriously as a strategy that wins.
The absolute worst thing any organization can do during the greatest of challenging times is to assume they can go on with “business as usual – and to go along with the status quo.” Instead, they must conduct themselves as great leaders do and get busy working to understand how organizational clients’ (internal and external) priorities may have changed and quickly realign the organizational business model to address their new needs. Reading through a past edition of the Wall Street Journal, most of the advertisements (for luxury watches, exorbitant real estate, and fabulous vacation resorts) looked embarrassingly inappropriate in view of the ongoing national economic crisis that the United States of America has been facing in the past few years and the next years to come.
One ad, from NOKIA, stood out in contrast. The headline: “Can anyone provide cost cutting solutions that work now? My answer is YES. Now, there’s an organization that seems to get it. But wait a minute. Didn’t that headline sound more than a little like Barack Obama? NOKIA seems to have understood the lesson from the past month’s U.S. election between President Elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain: Whether you’re overcoming organizational politics or training people to remain on top in their careers, the winners will be those who recognize that the game has changed, and that “same old stuff” just does not cut it any longer. The world’s processes have changed in ways that the world looks much different than it did a year ago (unemployment is up 47% from 2007 – 2008, home ownership is down 26% and the statistics continue to get grim). The way to make effective decisions require innovative thought and those who miss the opportunity to change will be left behind. The best quote that I teach from fits great here: “If people seek to achieve what they have never had, they MUST be prepared to do what they have never done.”
As a U.S. Marine turned business professional, responsible for leading a dynamic team of specialist into the lion’s belly when the team engages a client who is seeking to overcome business and process challenges, innovation takes precedent as our strategic starting point. Our team defines the importance of the war room, helps to identify its location and then the work begins – in the newly organized Innovation War Room. Without this component added to the mix, there’s no need to start because without it, the potential for failure rises incredibly. As we establish these critical strategy rooms, we teach companies to unpack their business model into five Centers of Gravity: Leadership, Infrastructure, Processes, Populations and Action Units. These five are used to influence positive organizational behavior from the leadership who is responsible for making the decisions to drive momentum: who they serve, what service they provide how they provide it, how they generate revenue and how they differentiate and sustain a strategic advantage.
Then we demonstrate how the Centers of Gravity are used to radically rethink each component using the “Six Lenses of Innovation” – the cutting-edge military-style ideation and methodology, “Battleplan for Preemptive Strike,” outlined in my latest book “Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams.” So, we get the strategy teams to (1) Establish Achievable Aims; challenge deeply-held orthodoxies about who their customers are, how they interact with them, how they define their products or services, how they configure the value chain, and so on; (2) Identify Means; harness emergent trends and discontinuities to substantially change the way things are done in their industry; (3) Ensure Intelligence; leverage core competencies and strategic assets in novel ways to generate new growth; (4) Enforce Security; understand and address deep customer needs that are currently going unmet; (5) Engage the Strike; a deliberate Battleplan used by a strategic and numerically inferior power to head off a situation in which ultimate defeat would be inevitable; and lastly, (6) Flawlessly Execute the Exit Strategy; just as everything has a beginning, all things have an end. Leaders are instructed how-to establish exit points using 32 solution-centric precepts to face fierce challenges in short time frames using the process.
We believe that as organizations begin to reshape their cultures; it’s not hard to recognize how the principles found within the military-style ideation and methodology of the Battleplan for Preemptive Strike apply to the many burning platforms organizations are facing today. Isn’t it time you subjected your own business model to some “creative reconstruction,” aimed at making it better suited to today’s shifting customer needs and new economic realities?
Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts, A United States Marine turned business professional is co-author of Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams (Book Surge Publishing, 2009) and Founder and Chairman of the Bison Group Corporation, a management consulting and training firm. He is the author The Process of LeaderShaping, a cultural transformational program and university course of study and has consulted or presented to numerous leading U.S. and foreign corporations, helping them to realize increased integrated talent management strategies, team building maneuvers, and decision-making skills to compete in today’s highly uncertain business environments. He has also authored four additional publications with his most successful title, The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership (Kendall Hunt, 2007). His works allowed him to be chosen as the technical, military and development specialists by the U.S. film industry to the feature film “Stateside” that released in theaters in May 2004 where he trained and acted onscreen with “A-List” talents Val Kilmer and Jonathan Tucker along with 75 -other actors, teaching them the principles of leadership, team development, and influence for the production. He is now teaching his programs at Temple University.
Published on 12/15/2008
I have continued to state enthusiastically over the last few years that, in a world where the pace of change has gone hypercritical, today’s most important race is the race for transformational leadership and organizational renewal. It is the race to change as fast as the environment is changing around you; the race to influence positive organizational behaviors and the race to reinvent your strategy and your business model before they become obsolete. When the economy is in a state in flux, most organizations tend to postpone their professional development efforts and favor cost cutting as the strategy that will preserve the future. This is a grave mistake that will affect the future of the organization in ways that will likely kill the very spirit the leadership teams are hoping to preserve. Their efforts during the challenging times will only prolong the inevitable; ultimate demise once the current crisis is diminished. The lesson here is this; a successful business model will break almost overnight when the waves of the ocean start crashing against the pillars of the pier if leadership does not remain on a continuous, yet discontinuous approach to train the organization’s greatest asset – the people.
So what exactly is Strategic Organizational Renewal (SOR)?
Organizations undergo change to enhance their productivity. Changes can be effected in several areas of the organization including culture, strategy, mission, teams and organizational structure. SOR is a framework that defines the role, responsibilities, and performance of human capital across the organization and the planning for it must only take place in the organizations “war room.” To explain the war room concept, leadership appoints a specific room that will be specified as the location where the organizations strategy is planned. This location must remain under lock and key to ensure the organization’s intellectual capital offers an uncompromised agenda that influences positive outcomes. SOR is the resulting effect that is birthed from the war room. This is only possible when those appointed to the war room each understands the importance of establishing the organization’s “Memorandum of Understanding” (MOU) – the principles to achieve professional mastery.
Establishing Principles to Achieve Personal Mastery – People First, then the Organization
You now have before you the opportunity to take the steps that achieve a high level of professional mastery that achieves organizational growth. It requires the adoption of a “code” as a living, breathing organism to each level of the organization. How can people build awareness, use their experiences to implement a new approach to deportment and develop a strategy, which includes resolve and ethical conduct? This is the task that lies before them.
It sounds like the normal work that we all know and do so well. But be cautioned, it is not! When individuals combine the code with rules and regulations, reporting and accountability to force conformity to standards, they will fail – to oppose change by way of fear is not what is required. Rather, achieving professional mastery is a continuous pursuit of ethical behavior that ultimately manifests into a quest of improving the human spirit; to pursue good, to do the right thing in across the workplace. The code says that who ever should adopt it into his/her life, will possess a level of courage – both physically and emotionally – to execute the necessary task that drives performance to exemplify the highest level of personal and professional conviction.
Why establish a code to live by? The answer is simple; establishing a code or set of principles ensures a level of conduct (code of conduct) that extends the life cycle of the organization. This code of conduct is what I have been referencing – the “Memorandum of Understanding.” As a code of conduct, the MOU provides a resource to assist people in their personal development, growth, guidance, and assessment in the leadership of self. The MOU establishes a strict perspective for instructing successful practices, theories, and beliefs that drives people to achieve a successful future (how you intend to conduct yourself into the future for others to emulate).
The Memorandum of Understanding is also designed for people to learn broadly; to inspire the service out of generosity for others; and to prepare them to lead systems courageously into the future. A MOU must encourage a perspective to become firmly grounded in the potential for successful growth using the following constructs:
- The Cardinal Rules
- The Guiding Precepts
- The Forms of Disposition
- The General Orders
- The Strategy Forward – Establishing Professional Mastery
- The Centers of Gravity
The Cardinal Rules. The Cardinal Rules are a set of guidelines that are invaluable for people and organizations to follow while planning and executing at the strategic or tactical level. These rules, once established by the individual(s) or teams are the rules that govern forward movement and must not change.
The Guiding Precepts. The Guiding Precepts are designed to inform people what they should and should not be doing in accordance with executing a well designed strategy to win. They also inform of the reasons “why” an action must occur and the repercussions should the individual and/or organization fail at meeting such a task.
The Forms of Disposition. The Forms of Disposition offer a substantive transformation in “thought” about how people achieve a perspective on things in life. It refers to an orchestrated, systemic and revolutionary new world-view resulting in a “change” of societies, cultures, and marketplaces due to behavioral perspective. This is today often called "systems theory," which sees a web of relationships coalescing to become something greater than the parts. Individuals must be able to look at things from a perspective that they are always changing and evolving into new forms – thinking “out-of-the-box!” We are doomed to a slow death unless radical change occurs in the way we think. Change your way of thinking or die a slow death.
The General Orders. The General Orders are broad, community-wide "need statements,” designed to encompass a variety of related issues in a person’s life or within the life cycle of an organization. These related issues are referred to as “Guiding Objectives,” which are specific items that need to be addressed. The Guiding Strategies (developed to fit current and future circumstance) are the methods identified for addressing the Guiding Objectives, and the Guiding Policies are the specific action steps that are recommended to implement the Guiding Strategies. The General Orders, all eleven of them, offer the ability to explore implications in an open and reflective manner and reinforce each other in providing a coherency and wholeness often lacking in life cycles.
The Strategy Forward – Establishing Professional Mastery. The traditional values are the foundation of the modern day; that was yesterday. Tomorrow, you have an opportunity to create commitment and the needed momentum to establish, publish, share, and teach a different set of life’s code, values, and ethics to journey into the future. After much hard work, you are prepared to develop a strategy to move forward and plan the next steps to target critical successes for winning the Future Picture. What a legacy you will leave when executed with personal and professional bearing for others to follow. This is the way of the future. This is a new chapter!
The Centers of Gravity. Just as time changes, so does the internal and external influence in your life and in the life cycle of an organization. The Centers of Gravity are the dynamics within a process that offer the greatest impact on the overall system when change happens. They offer a high level of “value” and return on your energy “investment.” When combined with the concept of parallel deposits (creating energy from various perspectives in a short period of time), the Centers of Gravity make possible the seemingly impossible task of realizing success in changing paradigms. The Centers of Gravity places significant influence on the five established epicenters of any changing system to receive desired effects: Leadership, Processes, Infrastructure, Population, and Action Units.
In summary, I see the Memorandum of Understanding (once established for the organization), as an opportunity to free up the actions of people as servants, but develop them as encouraged opportunists. It is empowering, it is enabling, and it grounds people in a public way on the fundamentals that they all must share to benefit the organization. There is no ethical malaise. It is important to realize that the new is not a finding from what has been lost. Rather, it is like the journey of the scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz in search of a brain (brain power in this context), the tin man in search of a heart, and the lion in search of courage. People’s value system is intact and in most cases, has been during the journey of personal growth. The MOU simply articulates and reaffirms the core value and behavioral perspective that already underlie their personal and professional appearance and conduct to achieve significant growth. And, all of this is stimulated from the affects of the war room; hence, the influences that lead to significant strategic organizational renewal in the end.
The Memorandum of Understanding is designed to help an organization answer four fundamental questions in order to develop and execute an effective strategy forward plan. These questions are:
- Where does the organization want to be in the future?
- What will the organization apply its resources against to achieve the Future Picture?
- How will the organization apply those resources?
- When and under what conditions will the organization exit from their current strategic plan?
It’s the act of dynamically adjusting business models and strategies to the deep changes at work in the external environment. Above all else, this requires innovation and the Memorandum of Understanding definitely offers an innovative perspective to most organizations. In a 2003 article in Harvard Business Review entitled “The Quest for Resilience,” Gary Hamel wrote, “Strategic renewal is creative reconstruction.” It’s all about dissecting the traditional business model and examining it for imaginative ways to reconstruct it to create significant intellectual and emotional thought space for value creation to positively influence the internal and external customers of the organization. This becomes all the more urgent in challenging times, when customer needs and market conditions swiftly and dramatically change.
As in the case of the New Covenant Church of Philadelphia organization, where the senior pastor and Chief Executive Officer Bishop C. Milton Grannum, set aside a specific room on the same floor of the building as his office for directing the organization’s strategic organizational renewal efforts. The organization’s new “war room” had the same critical importance as Winston Churchill’s cabinet war room in London, used to direct military strategy during World War II. Bishop Grannum’s Innovation War Room was a simple, but highly effective device that guided the New Covenant Church of Philadelphia’s appointed leadership team to focus on establishing the strategy forward to reinvent the business model and find bold, new growth opportunities. And, its impact on the organization’s strategies – and, ultimately, its performance – is still being felt today.
Late in the month of November 2008, even in the face of formidable pressures and economic challenges, New Covenant Church of Philadelphia braved the climate and made the decision to bring in yet another trainer, speaker and author Dr. David Ireland from the region only to learn that they were on the right path to extend the organization’s life cycle. The New Covenant Church of Philadelphia continues to be one of the most progressive thinking faith-based organizations in the region.
The reason; the CEO fully understands that the time to input integrated talent management to boost the organization’s human capital is when most organizations are calling on “cost cutting” as its strategy in the face of adverse conditions.
Very few organizations, for-profit and not-for-profit, can claim to have a specific innovation war room somewhere on location. But, what every organization can and should do – right now! – is organize a serious, high-level strategy forum (at least call it the “Innovation War Room” where innovation intersects strategy) to begin exercising transformative thinking and rethinking their business from the customer backward.
One of the fundamental questions the leadership team must ask is this: “how do we get the people to buy-into the organization’s new perspective of transformational thinking to experience upward movement in a market where people no longer have financial resources?” And, in a nutshell, it is my perspective that in answering the question, these people should take a look at the slogan of Royal Bank of Scotland: “Less Talk!” “Start engaging the necessary requirements to strategically execute flawlessly to influence the organizations Future Picture.” Innovation powers us out of everything and must be taken seriously as a strategy that wins.
The absolute worst thing any organization can do during the greatest of challenging times is to assume they can go on with “business as usual – and to go along with the status quo.” Instead, they must conduct themselves as great leaders do and get busy working to understand how organizational clients’ (internal and external) priorities may have changed and quickly realign the organizational business model to address their new needs. Reading through a past edition of the Wall Street Journal, most of the advertisements (for luxury watches, exorbitant real estate, and fabulous vacation resorts) looked embarrassingly inappropriate in view of the ongoing national economic crisis that the United States of America has been facing in the past few years and the next years to come.
One ad, from NOKIA, stood out in contrast. The headline: “Can anyone provide cost cutting solutions that work now? My answer is YES. Now, there’s an organization that seems to get it. But wait a minute. Didn’t that headline sound more than a little like Barack Obama? NOKIA seems to have understood the lesson from the past month’s U.S. election between President Elect Barack Obama and Senator John McCain: Whether you’re overcoming organizational politics or training people to remain on top in their careers, the winners will be those who recognize that the game has changed, and that “same old stuff” just does not cut it any longer. The world’s processes have changed in ways that the world looks much different than it did a year ago (unemployment is up 47% from 2007 – 2008, home ownership is down 26% and the statistics continue to get grim). The way to make effective decisions require innovative thought and those who miss the opportunity to change will be left behind. The best quote that I teach from fits great here: “If people seek to achieve what they have never had, they MUST be prepared to do what they have never done.”
As a U.S. Marine turned business professional, responsible for leading a dynamic team of specialist into the lion’s belly when the team engages a client who is seeking to overcome business and process challenges, innovation takes precedent as our strategic starting point. Our team defines the importance of the war room, helps to identify its location and then the work begins – in the newly organized Innovation War Room. Without this component added to the mix, there’s no need to start because without it, the potential for failure rises incredibly. As we establish these critical strategy rooms, we teach companies to unpack their business model into five Centers of Gravity: Leadership, Infrastructure, Processes, Populations and Action Units. These five are used to influence positive organizational behavior from the leadership who is responsible for making the decisions to drive momentum: who they serve, what service they provide how they provide it, how they generate revenue and how they differentiate and sustain a strategic advantage.
Then we demonstrate how the Centers of Gravity are used to radically rethink each component using the “Six Lenses of Innovation” – the cutting-edge military-style ideation and methodology, “Battleplan for Preemptive Strike,” outlined in my latest book “Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams.” So, we get the strategy teams to (1) Establish Achievable Aims; challenge deeply-held orthodoxies about who their customers are, how they interact with them, how they define their products or services, how they configure the value chain, and so on; (2) Identify Means; harness emergent trends and discontinuities to substantially change the way things are done in their industry; (3) Ensure Intelligence; leverage core competencies and strategic assets in novel ways to generate new growth; (4) Enforce Security; understand and address deep customer needs that are currently going unmet; (5) Engage the Strike; a deliberate Battleplan used by a strategic and numerically inferior power to head off a situation in which ultimate defeat would be inevitable; and lastly, (6) Flawlessly Execute the Exit Strategy; just as everything has a beginning, all things have an end. Leaders are instructed how-to establish exit points using 32 solution-centric precepts to face fierce challenges in short time frames using the process.
We believe that as organizations begin to reshape their cultures; it’s not hard to recognize how the principles found within the military-style ideation and methodology of the Battleplan for Preemptive Strike apply to the many burning platforms organizations are facing today. Isn’t it time you subjected your own business model to some “creative reconstruction,” aimed at making it better suited to today’s shifting customer needs and new economic realities?
Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts, A United States Marine turned business professional is co-author of Business WARFIGHTING For GREAT Teams (Book Surge Publishing, 2009) and Founder and Chairman of the Bison Group Corporation, a management consulting and training firm. He is the author The Process of LeaderShaping, a cultural transformational program and university course of study and has consulted or presented to numerous leading U.S. and foreign corporations, helping them to realize increased integrated talent management strategies, team building maneuvers, and decision-making skills to compete in today’s highly uncertain business environments. He has also authored four additional publications with his most successful title, The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership (Kendall Hunt, 2007). His works allowed him to be chosen as the technical, military and development specialists by the U.S. film industry to the feature film “Stateside” that released in theaters in May 2004 where he trained and acted onscreen with “A-List” talents Val Kilmer and Jonathan Tucker along with 75 -other actors, teaching them the principles of leadership, team development, and influence for the production. He is now teaching his programs at Temple University.
Published on 12/15/2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
The Bison Group Appoints Business Development Specialist “Gordon Enterprises” to Head Reseller Recruitment in North America
Philadelphia, PA. – 8 December 2008: The Bison Group ® Corporation, the world leader in military-style executive education and LeaderShaping Applications, today launched its Reseller Partner Program for the North American region. A major objective of the program will be to recruit strategic resellers that provide added value to The Bison Group through their business and executive education expertise, their application focus, and their ability to expand geographic coverage. The Reseller Partner Program combined with Bison’s emotional intelligence, organizational behavior, transformational leadership, performance management assessments, strategic-execution and team building maneuver applications, along with its committed customer base, is expected to accelerate Bison’s success within the executive education space. The Bison Group customers will benefit from the program through accelerated delivery of targeted business training applications and the expertise that each reseller will be able to provide. The new program will lay the platform for Bison to enhance its service offerings to benefit Bison’s resellers worldwide.
Bison’s Reseller Partner Program centers on providing resellers with effective sales and marketing support and online support programs, tools, training and support services needed to ensure their business success. The program delivers value to resellers’ by rewarding them for their commitment with a number of financial incentives for engaging with Bison on joint business opportunities. Resellers will receive program benefits, including marketing development resources for joint lead generation activities, sales training, discounts on developer certification classes and passes to Bison’s Annual User Conferences. In addition, resellers will be able to take advantage of qualified lead opportunities across the multi-disciplined business, university and non-profit sectors, discounts on the published list price of Bison publications and research applications, referral fee bonuses, and access to the Bison Partner Center, a secure portal providing partners with quick access to the latest news, events, sales productivity and marketing collateral, training courses, and product demos for maximizing revenue potential with Bison.
“We view resellers as extremely valuable in maintaining our market leadership in executive education,” said Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts, Founder and Chairman of The Bison Group. “We’re confident that building relationships with resellers in key areas through the Reseller Partner Program will contribute to our success and provide a win-win situation in which Bison, our customer base, and our resellers will flourish.”
The team at Gordon Enterprises, Bison’s newly appointed specialists for North American Operations will spearhead the Reseller Partner Program. Gordon Enterprises has almost 40 years of success in selling strategic and tactical enterprise learning products and services engagements.
“I am excited to build relationships with resellers because they are a key component to the success of Bison’s vision and will be treated as true extensions of The Bison Group’s sales force,” said Denise Headley, Director of Channels for North American Operations at the Gordon Enterprise Corporation. “Resellers will be empowered for success through access to the same programs, sales productivity tools, training, and marketing collateral as we provide for our own sales force. With this formula we are confident that we can leverage the reseller channel to expand Bison’s reach for maximum growth.”
About Bison’s Reseller Partner Program
To learn more about the Reseller Partner program, please visit http://www.thebisongroup.com, or email Dpitts@thebisongroup.com.
About The Bison Group ® Corporation
The Bison Group, a team of U.S. Marines turned business professionals, is a leader in military-style executive education and learning services for business, education, government, faith-based organizations and higher learning institutions. Bison’s consultancy boutique works to improve the clients’ business performance by redesigning how they behave, think, and train their associates using strategies from the U.S. Marine Corps. It is the goal of Bison’s teams to implement the rigor and discipline from its training designs, instruct the global marketplace how-to increase their HumanSigma, and increase performance and integrated talent management’s “best practices” to exceed the outcomes within the Future Picture that lie waiting around the immediate corner.
The Bison Group is dedicated to increasing the richness, interactivity and effectiveness of executive education programming for everyone, everywhere. Bison delivers the next generation Emotional Intelligence platform for both customer and employee-facing applications – and its platform boasts unmatched scalability, high-performance, reliability and security that achieves’ personal and professional mastery. The proven leadership, organizational behavior, strategic-execution, and team building maneuver capabilities and highly collaborative program development architecture provides the needed resources and tools for organizations in any industry to win on every competitive battlefield they engage.
Copyright © 2008 The Bison Group ® Corporation. All rights reserved. Bison’s logo is a registered trademark of The Bison Group Corporation.
Bison’s Reseller Partner Program centers on providing resellers with effective sales and marketing support and online support programs, tools, training and support services needed to ensure their business success. The program delivers value to resellers’ by rewarding them for their commitment with a number of financial incentives for engaging with Bison on joint business opportunities. Resellers will receive program benefits, including marketing development resources for joint lead generation activities, sales training, discounts on developer certification classes and passes to Bison’s Annual User Conferences. In addition, resellers will be able to take advantage of qualified lead opportunities across the multi-disciplined business, university and non-profit sectors, discounts on the published list price of Bison publications and research applications, referral fee bonuses, and access to the Bison Partner Center, a secure portal providing partners with quick access to the latest news, events, sales productivity and marketing collateral, training courses, and product demos for maximizing revenue potential with Bison.
“We view resellers as extremely valuable in maintaining our market leadership in executive education,” said Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts, Founder and Chairman of The Bison Group. “We’re confident that building relationships with resellers in key areas through the Reseller Partner Program will contribute to our success and provide a win-win situation in which Bison, our customer base, and our resellers will flourish.”
The team at Gordon Enterprises, Bison’s newly appointed specialists for North American Operations will spearhead the Reseller Partner Program. Gordon Enterprises has almost 40 years of success in selling strategic and tactical enterprise learning products and services engagements.
“I am excited to build relationships with resellers because they are a key component to the success of Bison’s vision and will be treated as true extensions of The Bison Group’s sales force,” said Denise Headley, Director of Channels for North American Operations at the Gordon Enterprise Corporation. “Resellers will be empowered for success through access to the same programs, sales productivity tools, training, and marketing collateral as we provide for our own sales force. With this formula we are confident that we can leverage the reseller channel to expand Bison’s reach for maximum growth.”
About Bison’s Reseller Partner Program
To learn more about the Reseller Partner program, please visit http://www.thebisongroup.com, or email Dpitts@thebisongroup.com.
About The Bison Group ® Corporation
The Bison Group, a team of U.S. Marines turned business professionals, is a leader in military-style executive education and learning services for business, education, government, faith-based organizations and higher learning institutions. Bison’s consultancy boutique works to improve the clients’ business performance by redesigning how they behave, think, and train their associates using strategies from the U.S. Marine Corps. It is the goal of Bison’s teams to implement the rigor and discipline from its training designs, instruct the global marketplace how-to increase their HumanSigma, and increase performance and integrated talent management’s “best practices” to exceed the outcomes within the Future Picture that lie waiting around the immediate corner.
The Bison Group is dedicated to increasing the richness, interactivity and effectiveness of executive education programming for everyone, everywhere. Bison delivers the next generation Emotional Intelligence platform for both customer and employee-facing applications – and its platform boasts unmatched scalability, high-performance, reliability and security that achieves’ personal and professional mastery. The proven leadership, organizational behavior, strategic-execution, and team building maneuver capabilities and highly collaborative program development architecture provides the needed resources and tools for organizations in any industry to win on every competitive battlefield they engage.
Copyright © 2008 The Bison Group ® Corporation. All rights reserved. Bison’s logo is a registered trademark of The Bison Group Corporation.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Military Training and Simulation is Increasingly Required by Business & Industry
The Bison Group ® Corporation has announced the integration of the “Process of LeaderShaping” initiative – a framework that identifies the behaviors (Organizational Behavior) and influences (Transformational Leadership) that drives performance. U.S. Military Training and Simulation for business and industry offers a future-oriented, "architectural" approach to developing and executing winning strategies that cover the life-cycle of people development, the organization’s future, and the processes within business units. The process is intended for those who want to create a better tomorrow for themselves and their organizations. The process establishes a series of Cardinal Rules and Guiding Precepts to guide organizations into greater paradigms using United States Marine Corps strategy to differentiate themselves from the status quo by thinking strategically. This is a process that integrates large scale planning and strategic execution methods; it aligns the lessons from the battlefields into the lives of people and into the boardrooms across the business marketplace. The Process of LeaderShaping accelerates the actions that are necessary for successful performance management initiatives that win.
In April 2005, the Wharton School of Business students, staff, and sponsors traveled to the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia to learn what they were really made of. The venture, aptly titled "Learning Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Complexity," sought to expose the future business leaders of the world, to the types of training exercises that have produced generations of successful military leaders. While there are obvious differences between battlefield leadership and corporate leadership, there are also many parallels that can be drawn – especially in the constantly evolving business landscape. We could be nimbler in our decision-making. We could be team players, even from the top. We could lead by example. And we could actively train our subordinates to eventually lead us. Sounds like hogwash? Don't forget that the U.S. Marines has a proven track record – 226 years and running. This program at Wharton lives on today.
An extraordinary organization is one that is driven by extraordinary people who make a distinctive impact and deliver superior performance over a long period of time.
There are some striking characteristics of the leaders who achieve sustained success along their journey in life. They experience an increased level of personal mastery. These leaders have gone through a process. The process serves as a guiding framework, solely based on the inevitability for making significant change to influence greatness within an individual’s life and environment. This is a similar process used to indoctrinate people into the U.S. Marine Corps – an organization that experiences quality in its people who drives significant performance within its system.
The LeaderShaping framework is straightforward for successful application. It offers a significant leadership advantage that provides a philosophy, the experiential quality, and the strategic methodology to help users with successfully applying the inherent tools to achieve an increase in efficiency and effectiveness within their leadership capacity.
The framework’s construct combines the entire LeaderShaping process into a unique configuration that results significant performance management value: The Talent Strategy & Planning process, the Organizational Strategic Execution (OrgSx) process, and the disciplines used within the Team Building Maneuvers protocol. Used consciously, the entire process provides the lighthouse for personal mastery and professional development – cultural change, opportunity and process improvement at the individual, team and organization levels – the needed breakthrough for strategic execution.
The framework provides a foundation of cultural influences and the collective behaviors used to stimulate people to take the journey from ordinary to extraordinary. Its use allows them the confidence and courage to face the adverse realities of their current situation, to recognize what they can actually achieve given the powerful organizational and relationship dynamics without thinking that they can actually achieve success through their own will, and become more powerful than they are. And then, at the same time, while moving equal amounts of energy from the depths of their character, they decide who they want to be, so they can stand firm on personal conviction and the best practices of life that they believe most deeply in. They are able to accept criticism as the stratagem that brings them closer to achieving extraordinary results.
This is the beginning stage within an expected healthy debate about the nature and effectiveness of employing transformational thinking and change across organizations. These are the same organizations that are seeking to achieve a well planned Future Picture for generations to follow.
Summary
The United States continues to be the undisputed leader at providing professional development and training to increase levels of personal prosperity for business preparedness and readiness against conventional enemies.
Asymmetric warfare across the business marketplace, however, has increased the need for military training and simulation integration, thereby increasing market demand. It has also encouraged the development of new and non-traditional strategic and tactical solutions, which has saved numerous organizations from an ultimate demise.
As warfighters (leaders) are required to maintain the highest levels of operational readiness and excellence through training and simulation both at home and abroad, so should business & industry offer a vast array of cutting-edge solutions such as counter-improvised explosive device (IED) training, the behaviors that cause organizations and people to become casualties on the business battlefronts, and organizational behavioral simulations to prepare leaders and managers against the enemy. Furthermore, executive education is vital for business transformation as it will enable warfighters to leverage the latest advances in performance management knowledge and technologies.
The LeaderShaping framework, a warfighter’s body armor to protect against personal and professional failure, provides summary answers to key questions about why it is important for people to accept “change” using transformational thinking:
- What is it and how is it applied?
- Why is it critical to my current circumstance?
- How will it help me to respond to problems and challenges?
- Can it help me with influencing positive change within my point of view?
- How does it help me to respond to the pace of my changing environment?
- How does it help me to respond to rules and procedures set by others?
As it relates external organizational relationships, the framework prepares the individual’s voice to be heard at answering these key questions:
- Where does your organization want to be in the future?
- What will the organization apply its resources against to achieve the Future Picture?
- How will the organization apply those resources?
- When and under what conditions will the organization exit from its current strategic plan?
Ultimately, the framework provides a performance DNA to the individual and to the organization. Once this is achieved, a breakthrough is experienced and the performance management value and quality increases.
The framework achieves personal and professional mastery from the outcomes that help to understand talents from a warfighter’s three distinctive areas: Behaviors, motivators, and competencies. These are the strengths and weaknesses, or the “Strength Finders,” used to win in any situation.
Increasing Value Proposition and Cost Effectiveness Crucial To Market Success
Live training continues to evolve from the Cold War paradigm toward new solutions that prepare warfighters to fight against asymmetric enemies often embedded in civilian populations and organizations. Since 2005, the Bison Group has invested substantially in new live training solutions to counter challenges faced in the business marketplace, specifically Military Operations Counter-IED Devices: Decision-making, collective behaviors, and cultural influences.
However, the heavy financial burden of the U.S. economy, another form of conflict, “Domestic War on Terror (DWOT),” has taken valuable resources away from future planned training and simulation and instead toward extending the life cycle of organizations in trouble. Therefore, the industry is being forced to deliver temporary solutions for less instead of future-oriented growth strategies designed to increase capacity to the individual and system. To address this issue, training and simulation – the LeaderShaping framework – provides proven solutions where people and organizations achieve high levels of performance to result in extraordinary outcomes.
For more information visit http://www.thebisongroup.com
In April 2005, the Wharton School of Business students, staff, and sponsors traveled to the U.S. Marine Corps Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia to learn what they were really made of. The venture, aptly titled "Learning Leadership and Decision Making Under Uncertainty and Complexity," sought to expose the future business leaders of the world, to the types of training exercises that have produced generations of successful military leaders. While there are obvious differences between battlefield leadership and corporate leadership, there are also many parallels that can be drawn – especially in the constantly evolving business landscape. We could be nimbler in our decision-making. We could be team players, even from the top. We could lead by example. And we could actively train our subordinates to eventually lead us. Sounds like hogwash? Don't forget that the U.S. Marines has a proven track record – 226 years and running. This program at Wharton lives on today.
An extraordinary organization is one that is driven by extraordinary people who make a distinctive impact and deliver superior performance over a long period of time.
There are some striking characteristics of the leaders who achieve sustained success along their journey in life. They experience an increased level of personal mastery. These leaders have gone through a process. The process serves as a guiding framework, solely based on the inevitability for making significant change to influence greatness within an individual’s life and environment. This is a similar process used to indoctrinate people into the U.S. Marine Corps – an organization that experiences quality in its people who drives significant performance within its system.
The LeaderShaping framework is straightforward for successful application. It offers a significant leadership advantage that provides a philosophy, the experiential quality, and the strategic methodology to help users with successfully applying the inherent tools to achieve an increase in efficiency and effectiveness within their leadership capacity.
The framework’s construct combines the entire LeaderShaping process into a unique configuration that results significant performance management value: The Talent Strategy & Planning process, the Organizational Strategic Execution (OrgSx) process, and the disciplines used within the Team Building Maneuvers protocol. Used consciously, the entire process provides the lighthouse for personal mastery and professional development – cultural change, opportunity and process improvement at the individual, team and organization levels – the needed breakthrough for strategic execution.
The framework provides a foundation of cultural influences and the collective behaviors used to stimulate people to take the journey from ordinary to extraordinary. Its use allows them the confidence and courage to face the adverse realities of their current situation, to recognize what they can actually achieve given the powerful organizational and relationship dynamics without thinking that they can actually achieve success through their own will, and become more powerful than they are. And then, at the same time, while moving equal amounts of energy from the depths of their character, they decide who they want to be, so they can stand firm on personal conviction and the best practices of life that they believe most deeply in. They are able to accept criticism as the stratagem that brings them closer to achieving extraordinary results.
This is the beginning stage within an expected healthy debate about the nature and effectiveness of employing transformational thinking and change across organizations. These are the same organizations that are seeking to achieve a well planned Future Picture for generations to follow.
Summary
The United States continues to be the undisputed leader at providing professional development and training to increase levels of personal prosperity for business preparedness and readiness against conventional enemies.
Asymmetric warfare across the business marketplace, however, has increased the need for military training and simulation integration, thereby increasing market demand. It has also encouraged the development of new and non-traditional strategic and tactical solutions, which has saved numerous organizations from an ultimate demise.
As warfighters (leaders) are required to maintain the highest levels of operational readiness and excellence through training and simulation both at home and abroad, so should business & industry offer a vast array of cutting-edge solutions such as counter-improvised explosive device (IED) training, the behaviors that cause organizations and people to become casualties on the business battlefronts, and organizational behavioral simulations to prepare leaders and managers against the enemy. Furthermore, executive education is vital for business transformation as it will enable warfighters to leverage the latest advances in performance management knowledge and technologies.
The LeaderShaping framework, a warfighter’s body armor to protect against personal and professional failure, provides summary answers to key questions about why it is important for people to accept “change” using transformational thinking:
- What is it and how is it applied?
- Why is it critical to my current circumstance?
- How will it help me to respond to problems and challenges?
- Can it help me with influencing positive change within my point of view?
- How does it help me to respond to the pace of my changing environment?
- How does it help me to respond to rules and procedures set by others?
As it relates external organizational relationships, the framework prepares the individual’s voice to be heard at answering these key questions:
- Where does your organization want to be in the future?
- What will the organization apply its resources against to achieve the Future Picture?
- How will the organization apply those resources?
- When and under what conditions will the organization exit from its current strategic plan?
Ultimately, the framework provides a performance DNA to the individual and to the organization. Once this is achieved, a breakthrough is experienced and the performance management value and quality increases.
The framework achieves personal and professional mastery from the outcomes that help to understand talents from a warfighter’s three distinctive areas: Behaviors, motivators, and competencies. These are the strengths and weaknesses, or the “Strength Finders,” used to win in any situation.
Increasing Value Proposition and Cost Effectiveness Crucial To Market Success
Live training continues to evolve from the Cold War paradigm toward new solutions that prepare warfighters to fight against asymmetric enemies often embedded in civilian populations and organizations. Since 2005, the Bison Group has invested substantially in new live training solutions to counter challenges faced in the business marketplace, specifically Military Operations Counter-IED Devices: Decision-making, collective behaviors, and cultural influences.
However, the heavy financial burden of the U.S. economy, another form of conflict, “Domestic War on Terror (DWOT),” has taken valuable resources away from future planned training and simulation and instead toward extending the life cycle of organizations in trouble. Therefore, the industry is being forced to deliver temporary solutions for less instead of future-oriented growth strategies designed to increase capacity to the individual and system. To address this issue, training and simulation – the LeaderShaping framework – provides proven solutions where people and organizations achieve high levels of performance to result in extraordinary outcomes.
For more information visit http://www.thebisongroup.com
Monday, May 19, 2008
Organizations, People & Performance
HumanSigma Ideation™
When an organization doesn't meet the stakeholders' needs and expectations, the cause is rarely a misguided posture, purpose, and alignment of strategy or vision. Instead, underperformance is more often the result of a misalignment of the organization's strategy and its many complexes and interacting parts.
To address such situations, The Bison Group’s “HumanSigma Ideation” platform integrates learning models to helps organizations with their HR functions and designs, based on market economics and customized to deliver against stakeholder expectations, customer needs, and the relationships among the constituencies in the organization's extended enterprise.
Tailored to meet an organization’s particular situation (people and systems), a Refreshed Operating Model typically includes any or all of the following elements:
- Enterprise People Solutions – Relationship Management Platform for allocating scarce resources to align people processes to organizational goals
- Organizational Execution (OrgEx) modeling used within change management processes in developing the learning organization and great teams
- A team maneuvers framework that clearly identifies and motivates individuals to work, individually and together, toward strategic objectives
- Profit-accountable business units formed around distinct value propositions
- Supply Chain Management that delivers a combination of innovative strategies with practical know-how to help organizations design, build, and operate new system models to dramatically improve competitive advantage
- Support services based on market models to serve internal clients responsively and competitively
- Innovative and strategically focused leadership teams
- Strategic-Execution that provides continuous exploration in new sources of shareholder value by delivering products and services more effectively and efficiently
- Alliances and partnerships – Enterprise Resource Planning with best-in-class providers to leverage scale, access expertise, and increase flexibility within people and organizational platforms
- Linkages among organizational elements that measure, inform, and motivate them to effectively work together to execute the firm's strategy – positive organizational behavior and transformational leadership
The Organizational Breakthrough TTI Simulation Experience
Learn about the OrgEx DNA Instrument™, a powerful web-based instrument and simulation for executives to experiment with decisions and view the resulting impact to their organizations. The power behind the simulation lies in empirical relationships identified in 100,000 observations from over 1,000 organizations, which reliably predict outcomes that apply to their own organizational environment.
To learn more about The Bison Group’s experience in helping organizations create Refreshed Operating Models to improve organizational effectiveness, request a copy of our “HumanSigma Ideation Series” today by email at: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Start the evolution that begins a tactical-philosophy to win in your people today!
When an organization doesn't meet the stakeholders' needs and expectations, the cause is rarely a misguided posture, purpose, and alignment of strategy or vision. Instead, underperformance is more often the result of a misalignment of the organization's strategy and its many complexes and interacting parts.
To address such situations, The Bison Group’s “HumanSigma Ideation” platform integrates learning models to helps organizations with their HR functions and designs, based on market economics and customized to deliver against stakeholder expectations, customer needs, and the relationships among the constituencies in the organization's extended enterprise.
Tailored to meet an organization’s particular situation (people and systems), a Refreshed Operating Model typically includes any or all of the following elements:
- Enterprise People Solutions – Relationship Management Platform for allocating scarce resources to align people processes to organizational goals
- Organizational Execution (OrgEx) modeling used within change management processes in developing the learning organization and great teams
- A team maneuvers framework that clearly identifies and motivates individuals to work, individually and together, toward strategic objectives
- Profit-accountable business units formed around distinct value propositions
- Supply Chain Management that delivers a combination of innovative strategies with practical know-how to help organizations design, build, and operate new system models to dramatically improve competitive advantage
- Support services based on market models to serve internal clients responsively and competitively
- Innovative and strategically focused leadership teams
- Strategic-Execution that provides continuous exploration in new sources of shareholder value by delivering products and services more effectively and efficiently
- Alliances and partnerships – Enterprise Resource Planning with best-in-class providers to leverage scale, access expertise, and increase flexibility within people and organizational platforms
- Linkages among organizational elements that measure, inform, and motivate them to effectively work together to execute the firm's strategy – positive organizational behavior and transformational leadership
The Organizational Breakthrough TTI Simulation Experience
Learn about the OrgEx DNA Instrument™, a powerful web-based instrument and simulation for executives to experiment with decisions and view the resulting impact to their organizations. The power behind the simulation lies in empirical relationships identified in 100,000 observations from over 1,000 organizations, which reliably predict outcomes that apply to their own organizational environment.
To learn more about The Bison Group’s experience in helping organizations create Refreshed Operating Models to improve organizational effectiveness, request a copy of our “HumanSigma Ideation Series” today by email at: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Start the evolution that begins a tactical-philosophy to win in your people today!
Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance
As we continue to look at ways of being effective within our productivity, it is important to understand that the workforce has to do much more than just “work harder” and increase throughput. The workforce must rapidly be introduced to innovation and strategy mapping to remain on a continuum for growth to its systems and people platforms. In some cases, this requires a series of tasks to ramp up new business processes and technologies; learn to think outside of the box – transformational thinking – adapt new skills that transition the minds and transform the hearts of the people responsible for turning the ignition on outputs and efficiency, and to continuously reduce operating costs along the way. At the same time, an organization must be able to manage and support that type of productivity across the enterprise. Asking for too much? This very question leads to inexcusable results within the organizations vision, mission, and tactical philosophy to execute flawlessly. However, removing this way of thinking from the start places people and organizations on a good to great path of success.
Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance elicits the perspective that understands how-to maximize productivity as the result of complex, interrelated factors, ranging from people, technology and process, organizational behavior, culture, and incentives and reward systems. Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance is used to help organizations with understanding the “why” of their actions, in addition to the “what” of their behaviors, developing the required capacity to continually change and compete within their respective industry. All the while, they need to do so without buckling under the pressure of new ways to work or distribute their ongoing business operations.
Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance works to address these factors in an integrated fashion and within an added-valued effort to drive productivity. It demands that everyone involved in the process to have a significant voice in building the architecture of the enterprise (or work within the developed systems completed under the wings of colleagues). Once people have identified their place in the development and/or redevelopment of the planned future picture, the enterprise at that point, is able to ensure that the factors influencing the need for change must come together at all three levels of the organization – the enterprise, the workforce, and the individual! When this happens as a seamless application, the environment is then able to experience a complete productivity-enhancing experience with lessons learned for future transitions. There are a few ways of executing a successful Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative:
Enterprise People Solutions – Relationship Management Platform: Reengage customer management for the globalized, customer-centric, digital age that aligns people processes to organizational goals. “EPS” instructs how to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! The “EPS” approach helps internal/external clients create a superior experience and enhances the value of the relationships by combining knowledge and expertise with the latest tools and technologies. It also helps organizations to understand the outputs of transformational leadership and organizational behavior as a companywide responsibility – aligned with the highest integrated principles to substantially increase productivity, person-to-person interactions, and overall performance – by maximizing the potential of the workforce. Reflection: EPS – People.
Organizational Execution (OrgEx): Achieve professional mastery and lead change into becoming a positive force! Change is inevitable, progress is not. When a transition is needed within an organizational system, in most cases, there seems to be a prevailing disconnect of the broader knowledge “why” new systems and constructs are needed. The “OrgEx” approach provides 25 focus-specific and integrated strategies to be used for change in developing the learning organization and great teams. The management techniques outline a comprehensive knowledge paradigm for leading and navigating through tough waters from a three-Phased approach: strategy execution, teams, and sales. The information and lessons are used as a strategic guide for refreshing, developing, and/or reengineering the focus of management principles for winning by making satisfying decisions that contribute to valuable “agents of change” in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. Reflection: OrgEx – The Organization.
Strategic–Execution: A continuous exploration in new sources of shareholder value for client relations by investigating new markets or examine opportunities to grow in existing markets. Overcoming roadblocks require the learning of proven project management techniques to discover a wealth of valuable and flexible tools to be integrated immediately to ensure the success of all types of projects – internally and externally. The name of the game is “execution” and managing a combined strategy provides for a sound foundation, set of skills and techniques, and tactical proactive approach to win over the “Fallacy of Motivation on Execution” as it relates to the overall mission. Strategic-Execution also helps with identifying ways to deliver products and services more effectively and efficiently. Reflection: SE – Execution and Project Management.
Supply Chain Management: A combination of innovative strategies with practical know-how to help organizations design, build, and operate new system models that deliver superior supply chain performance and dramatically improve competitive advantage. SCM works hand-in-hand with Strategic-Execution on any number of different projects from channel integration, public and private B2B exchanges, and electronic fulfillment to supply chain synchronization. Reflection: SCM – Process Improvement, Workflow.
Enabling Businesses to Perform Better: Enterprise Resource Planning “ERP”Organizations must understand the criticality for achieving a position that occupies a unique position at the intersection of business and technology. Becoming an industry leader can be cumbersome if the appropriate calibrations are not made to effectively design and implement flexible enterprise solutions. “ERP” offers a winning solution to allow the world’s leading companies with automating, integrating and synchronizing real time information across their business platforms. Reflection: ERP – Flexible Enterprise Solutions (People & OrgEx).
Using these approaches to build dynamic leaders in business and industry is the foundation that helps connect organizations to their employees, customers, and partners. An effective Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative prepares leaders responsible for facilitating or managing change and identifies essential key business drivers that typically underlie the need for organizational change. You’ll become proficient at managing change, learning how to effectively work with key stakeholders in ways that build trust and support, and ensure positive outcomes for your bottom line.
And we cannot forget the one additional benefit to adopting this initiative format, overcoming “competitive arousal.” What is competitive arousal? This is the term that defines an individual’s approach to beat his/her rivals at any cost. For these personality types, it they are not careful, this adrenaline-fueled state can and will lead to all kinds of expensive mistakes – mostly in the form of losing personal relationships and character desecration. Yet again, an effective Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative will keep your competitive spirit in check. To explain “competitive arousal” in detail (a must read), please take a look at the Harvard Business Review article by Deepak Malhotra, Gillian Ku, J. Keith Murnighan entitled, “When Winning Is Everything.”
This text is specific to change agents and organizations who are seeking to learn creative and innovative strategies within their systems. To read the full white paper version on Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance, simply send an email to our team at: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Please reference the "CMTOP" in your subject line in order for us to process your request and send your "white paper" as quickly as possible.
Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance elicits the perspective that understands how-to maximize productivity as the result of complex, interrelated factors, ranging from people, technology and process, organizational behavior, culture, and incentives and reward systems. Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance is used to help organizations with understanding the “why” of their actions, in addition to the “what” of their behaviors, developing the required capacity to continually change and compete within their respective industry. All the while, they need to do so without buckling under the pressure of new ways to work or distribute their ongoing business operations.
Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance works to address these factors in an integrated fashion and within an added-valued effort to drive productivity. It demands that everyone involved in the process to have a significant voice in building the architecture of the enterprise (or work within the developed systems completed under the wings of colleagues). Once people have identified their place in the development and/or redevelopment of the planned future picture, the enterprise at that point, is able to ensure that the factors influencing the need for change must come together at all three levels of the organization – the enterprise, the workforce, and the individual! When this happens as a seamless application, the environment is then able to experience a complete productivity-enhancing experience with lessons learned for future transitions. There are a few ways of executing a successful Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative:
Enterprise People Solutions – Relationship Management Platform: Reengage customer management for the globalized, customer-centric, digital age that aligns people processes to organizational goals. “EPS” instructs how to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! The “EPS” approach helps internal/external clients create a superior experience and enhances the value of the relationships by combining knowledge and expertise with the latest tools and technologies. It also helps organizations to understand the outputs of transformational leadership and organizational behavior as a companywide responsibility – aligned with the highest integrated principles to substantially increase productivity, person-to-person interactions, and overall performance – by maximizing the potential of the workforce. Reflection: EPS – People.
Organizational Execution (OrgEx): Achieve professional mastery and lead change into becoming a positive force! Change is inevitable, progress is not. When a transition is needed within an organizational system, in most cases, there seems to be a prevailing disconnect of the broader knowledge “why” new systems and constructs are needed. The “OrgEx” approach provides 25 focus-specific and integrated strategies to be used for change in developing the learning organization and great teams. The management techniques outline a comprehensive knowledge paradigm for leading and navigating through tough waters from a three-Phased approach: strategy execution, teams, and sales. The information and lessons are used as a strategic guide for refreshing, developing, and/or reengineering the focus of management principles for winning by making satisfying decisions that contribute to valuable “agents of change” in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. Reflection: OrgEx – The Organization.
Strategic–Execution: A continuous exploration in new sources of shareholder value for client relations by investigating new markets or examine opportunities to grow in existing markets. Overcoming roadblocks require the learning of proven project management techniques to discover a wealth of valuable and flexible tools to be integrated immediately to ensure the success of all types of projects – internally and externally. The name of the game is “execution” and managing a combined strategy provides for a sound foundation, set of skills and techniques, and tactical proactive approach to win over the “Fallacy of Motivation on Execution” as it relates to the overall mission. Strategic-Execution also helps with identifying ways to deliver products and services more effectively and efficiently. Reflection: SE – Execution and Project Management.
Supply Chain Management: A combination of innovative strategies with practical know-how to help organizations design, build, and operate new system models that deliver superior supply chain performance and dramatically improve competitive advantage. SCM works hand-in-hand with Strategic-Execution on any number of different projects from channel integration, public and private B2B exchanges, and electronic fulfillment to supply chain synchronization. Reflection: SCM – Process Improvement, Workflow.
Enabling Businesses to Perform Better: Enterprise Resource Planning “ERP”Organizations must understand the criticality for achieving a position that occupies a unique position at the intersection of business and technology. Becoming an industry leader can be cumbersome if the appropriate calibrations are not made to effectively design and implement flexible enterprise solutions. “ERP” offers a winning solution to allow the world’s leading companies with automating, integrating and synchronizing real time information across their business platforms. Reflection: ERP – Flexible Enterprise Solutions (People & OrgEx).
Using these approaches to build dynamic leaders in business and industry is the foundation that helps connect organizations to their employees, customers, and partners. An effective Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative prepares leaders responsible for facilitating or managing change and identifies essential key business drivers that typically underlie the need for organizational change. You’ll become proficient at managing change, learning how to effectively work with key stakeholders in ways that build trust and support, and ensure positive outcomes for your bottom line.
And we cannot forget the one additional benefit to adopting this initiative format, overcoming “competitive arousal.” What is competitive arousal? This is the term that defines an individual’s approach to beat his/her rivals at any cost. For these personality types, it they are not careful, this adrenaline-fueled state can and will lead to all kinds of expensive mistakes – mostly in the form of losing personal relationships and character desecration. Yet again, an effective Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance initiative will keep your competitive spirit in check. To explain “competitive arousal” in detail (a must read), please take a look at the Harvard Business Review article by Deepak Malhotra, Gillian Ku, J. Keith Murnighan entitled, “When Winning Is Everything.”
This text is specific to change agents and organizations who are seeking to learn creative and innovative strategies within their systems. To read the full white paper version on Change Management and Talent & Organizational Performance, simply send an email to our team at: Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Please reference the "CMTOP" in your subject line in order for us to process your request and send your "white paper" as quickly as possible.
Monday, April 21, 2008
The Downside, a Tough Economy. The Upside, Opportunity Lies Within Us!
The Building Great Teams Project. Here we are standing at the doorstep within the 2008 economy knocking hard to come inside. Only, the door remains shut with no answer. We continue to knock, and knock hoping that someone would open it for us to be let in. The problem with this scenario is one that has so many of us being brought to our wits end, presented with few options of achieving our goals. Not unless a door is opened for the entry to be achieved, or so you may think. What am I referring you may be asking? The answer to this question lies in a word and it is one that offers a change to your life – “opportunity.”
The scenario also lays the foundation for what most people in America may already be thinking, “we have gone from a first class country to a third rate community.” I know that it may sound harsh and might even upset some of you with the profound statement, but I am only telling the truth. The United States of America is a great nation; however, we are one that is on a slippery slope heading in the wrong direction FAST!
We are currently facing economic and political crisis at proportions that for most people alive, this is the absolute worst it has been. Just as common folk didn’t see the shock of September 11th coming that held most of us frozen in time, unless we understand how to identify with the word opportunity, we will again be frozen in shock when terror strikes – and for most working Americans, it is already upon us with sky rocketing fuel prices (planes, trains, and automobiles…oops, let’s add one more here and say, our homes).
With our failing banking institutions, busted brokerages, toppled corporate giants, bankrupt cities and school systems, states in default, the news of killer asteroids heading towards earth, and foreign creditors cashing out U.S. securities, it seems to me that the stage may already be set and the biggest scare yet is on its way.
I believe that we can, as the most resilient nation in the world, overcome the doom and gloom we are facing. We can head it off with persistence and opportunity and to do so, we must ban together as great teams do, look adversity in its face and smile, and win at all cost. That’s right; the opportunity that I am referring lies in our abilities to ban as one to build small pockets of great teams at every level of our society. If we look back to our earlier days, WWI and WWII, Americans banned together as a team and we became a nation that could not be beat during some of the toughest times we had to face in those times. We simply need to do it again, only this time, we must move our teams from being good to becoming great.
In building great teams, there are a few things to consider just to get started:
- Team Basics & A Team Defined!
- People and Champions of Change
- Perspective (Lessons from the Wizard of Oz)
- The Future Picture
- The Ninefold Earth
A lack of opportunity may be knocking and for some people, it goes by its original name, “tough times.” But, for those who have the know-how for making the absolute best of a tough situation, slamming the door in the face of tough times is not a problem. It requires us to ban together as one – in our homes, on the job, and across organizations at every level to become a GREAT team.
I know that you have heard the saying, “tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” The problem with this statement is that although you might be that tough person, even you will fall to the perils of life’s burdens. This is the reason for this text, to provide a means of not falling, but if you do, having a failsafe for getting up. This brings me to the first consideration: Team basics and what is a team? Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics.
The day of the individual worker is over, as our life style in today's households and corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. Everyone needs someone. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior leadership, and they must be committed to draft and manage the right team of commandos to lead the effort.
Yet, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naive to the complexities of team dynamics. Smart leaders and managers understand what type of team model best suits the task, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.
This text is another part in my Building GREAT Teams project. If you would like to receive a full copy of the text, please send me an email at: Damian@BuildtheTeams.net. Also, please reference “The Guidebook” in your subject line in order for our team to process your request in a timely manner. You can also visit www.BuildtheTeams.net to learn more about the project.
The Building GREAT Teams project includes the publication bundle: “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (ISBN# 978-1-4196-7603), “The Monograph: How to Build and Manage the Process of Teams” (ISBN# 978-1-4196-9172-0), “The Guidebook: Essential Traits of a GRAET Team Player,” a series of performance management assessment instrument, 40-hours of instruction using strategies from the United States Marine Corps, and dynamic hands-on exercises. The project offers a systematic philosophy for excellence that achieves a philosophical paradigm for greatness; one offers liberation through process that ultimately leads to a reconciliation of practice. The publications area available at www.amazon.com, www.booksurge.com, or by emailing me at: Damian@BuildtheTeams.net.
Those who adopt the project are poised to learn how “not” to resist, but work with, the forces and paradigms of change, how to chart the path of organizational politics, how to build and manage the process of teams, and learn the essential traits of a GREAT team player!
The project offers an essential guidebook for building your team’s transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your team members, and driving performance management for optimal results.
In closing, I hope that you explore the many offerings from this project. Here’s a sampling from the project that is titled, “The Five Fundamentals.” There are Five Fundamentals – for this deliberation, for the making of comparisons and the assessing of conditions: the way, heaven, earth, command, discipline. I wish to explain only one; “the way,” causes men to be of one mind with their rulers, to live or die with them, and never to waver! (Definition) A team must stand firm on one vision with the ruler being the mission – to live by a creed and never falter and/or waiver on an issue that can stop the execution of the necessary steps within the established mission you are reaching.
Don’t ever fail within “the way!” This Guidebook helps you to define the other four for your life, team, and organization.
The scenario also lays the foundation for what most people in America may already be thinking, “we have gone from a first class country to a third rate community.” I know that it may sound harsh and might even upset some of you with the profound statement, but I am only telling the truth. The United States of America is a great nation; however, we are one that is on a slippery slope heading in the wrong direction FAST!
We are currently facing economic and political crisis at proportions that for most people alive, this is the absolute worst it has been. Just as common folk didn’t see the shock of September 11th coming that held most of us frozen in time, unless we understand how to identify with the word opportunity, we will again be frozen in shock when terror strikes – and for most working Americans, it is already upon us with sky rocketing fuel prices (planes, trains, and automobiles…oops, let’s add one more here and say, our homes).
With our failing banking institutions, busted brokerages, toppled corporate giants, bankrupt cities and school systems, states in default, the news of killer asteroids heading towards earth, and foreign creditors cashing out U.S. securities, it seems to me that the stage may already be set and the biggest scare yet is on its way.
I believe that we can, as the most resilient nation in the world, overcome the doom and gloom we are facing. We can head it off with persistence and opportunity and to do so, we must ban together as great teams do, look adversity in its face and smile, and win at all cost. That’s right; the opportunity that I am referring lies in our abilities to ban as one to build small pockets of great teams at every level of our society. If we look back to our earlier days, WWI and WWII, Americans banned together as a team and we became a nation that could not be beat during some of the toughest times we had to face in those times. We simply need to do it again, only this time, we must move our teams from being good to becoming great.
In building great teams, there are a few things to consider just to get started:
- Team Basics & A Team Defined!
- People and Champions of Change
- Perspective (Lessons from the Wizard of Oz)
- The Future Picture
- The Ninefold Earth
A lack of opportunity may be knocking and for some people, it goes by its original name, “tough times.” But, for those who have the know-how for making the absolute best of a tough situation, slamming the door in the face of tough times is not a problem. It requires us to ban together as one – in our homes, on the job, and across organizations at every level to become a GREAT team.
I know that you have heard the saying, “tough times don’t last, but tough people do.” The problem with this statement is that although you might be that tough person, even you will fall to the perils of life’s burdens. This is the reason for this text, to provide a means of not falling, but if you do, having a failsafe for getting up. This brings me to the first consideration: Team basics and what is a team? Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics.
The day of the individual worker is over, as our life style in today's households and corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. Everyone needs someone. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior leadership, and they must be committed to draft and manage the right team of commandos to lead the effort.
Yet, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naive to the complexities of team dynamics. Smart leaders and managers understand what type of team model best suits the task, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.
This text is another part in my Building GREAT Teams project. If you would like to receive a full copy of the text, please send me an email at: Damian@BuildtheTeams.net. Also, please reference “The Guidebook” in your subject line in order for our team to process your request in a timely manner. You can also visit www.BuildtheTeams.net to learn more about the project.
The Building GREAT Teams project includes the publication bundle: “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (ISBN# 978-1-4196-7603), “The Monograph: How to Build and Manage the Process of Teams” (ISBN# 978-1-4196-9172-0), “The Guidebook: Essential Traits of a GRAET Team Player,” a series of performance management assessment instrument, 40-hours of instruction using strategies from the United States Marine Corps, and dynamic hands-on exercises. The project offers a systematic philosophy for excellence that achieves a philosophical paradigm for greatness; one offers liberation through process that ultimately leads to a reconciliation of practice. The publications area available at www.amazon.com, www.booksurge.com, or by emailing me at: Damian@BuildtheTeams.net.
Those who adopt the project are poised to learn how “not” to resist, but work with, the forces and paradigms of change, how to chart the path of organizational politics, how to build and manage the process of teams, and learn the essential traits of a GREAT team player!
The project offers an essential guidebook for building your team’s transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your team members, and driving performance management for optimal results.
In closing, I hope that you explore the many offerings from this project. Here’s a sampling from the project that is titled, “The Five Fundamentals.” There are Five Fundamentals – for this deliberation, for the making of comparisons and the assessing of conditions: the way, heaven, earth, command, discipline. I wish to explain only one; “the way,” causes men to be of one mind with their rulers, to live or die with them, and never to waver! (Definition) A team must stand firm on one vision with the ruler being the mission – to live by a creed and never falter and/or waiver on an issue that can stop the execution of the necessary steps within the established mission you are reaching.
Don’t ever fail within “the way!” This Guidebook helps you to define the other four for your life, team, and organization.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
The Seven "T's" of Oz to Your Personal Transformation
A Long Walk On A Short Path
Keeping in the tradition of providing clever and entertaining instruction for people to grow their lives, I have teamed up with a new author, Leslie Ann Smith, to help develop an outstanding leadership project based on one of our film classics, "The Wizard of Oz."
The film's plot is easily condensed and allows for an immediate organizational behavioral approach that anyone can identify with: lonely and sad Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale (her complete name) dreams of a better place, without torment against her dog Toto from a hateful neighbor spinster, so she plans to run away. During a fierce tornado, Dorothy is struck on the head and transported to a land (Munchkin Land) "beyond the rainbow" where she meets magical characters from her Kansas life transformed within her unconscious dream state. After travels down a Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz (Emerald City), and the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy and her friends (the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion) are rewarded by the great Wizard of Oz with their heart's desires - and Dorothy is enabled to return home to Kansas by locating the depths of her inner self. This brings me to our project and its valuable and entertaining perspective for us all to learn from the cast of characters.
When we think about the reasons that one must take better care of their life, it would be smart to begin thinking outside of the norm for your way of accepting the perceived. This is your first step to a new you - personal prosperity - and freedom from the chains of bondage. There are seven principles that each of us must take to begin the “long walk on a short path!” This text offers a transformation through my hunger for knowledge and my thirst for instruction. Yes, there is a difference between “hunger” and “thirst” and the seven inherent principles will not only define them for you, they will prepare you to accept your right to choose the future that is awaiting your new transformation into greatness.
The seven principles, if they were an apple, would allow me to take a bite to quench my hunger for change.
They are outlined as:
1. Think (the Future Picture)
2. Tongue (Words of Wisdom: Voice)
3. Transition the Mind (the Scarecrow)
4. Transform the Heart (the Tin Woodman)
5. Totality of Courage (the Cowardly Lion)
6. Tortuous (Full of Twists and Turns)
7. Toxic (Leadership, Behaviors, Values)
As we seek to experience change for our lives, we must first try to construct our future picture. This means that we must already know what we want our future to look like when we get there. This form of thinking allows each of us to examine a word that for some is the opposite of what they may be using (your actions) in life now; proactive, the opposite of procrastination. Being proactive places you on a path that limits negative things from happening.
Using the characters from the Wizard of Oz and over the next few weeks, Smith and I will use this Blog as a vehicle to outline the seven principles for change that anyone can use to make significant deposits in their life. You’ll see glaring similarities between your life experiences and those of Dorothy Gale from Kansas, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Glenda -the Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Emerald City, and Munchkin Land. Your will be required to think “outside-the-box” for learning a new series of guiding principles.
Beginning with the first principle and throughout the entire text, it’s actually quiet simple. In order to plan a better future for yourself, like Dorothy Gale, all you have to do is think.
This text also offers a transformation that prepares you to accept your right to choose the necessary tools for finding your voice. It will inspire you to help others with finding theirs. The future awaits those who are proactive in their search for knowledge. Smith and I will attempt to entertain and prepare you for a significant walk into greatness.
Practicing her own principles, Smith released a “Monograph” version of her upcoming book, “A Long Walk On A Short Path,” for anyone who is seeking to make an immediate change. To get your copy, simply email me TODAY or contact Smith at lwsp@leslieasmith.com!
Publication Release Date: August 2008
Published by: Book Surge Publishing Company
Smith does an outstanding job and remains clever throughout her text keeping with the theme of Oz. Be prepared to learn, have fun, revisit your childhood, and GROW. This is one "NOT TO BE MISSED" and you will not be disappointed.
Keeping in the tradition of providing clever and entertaining instruction for people to grow their lives, I have teamed up with a new author, Leslie Ann Smith, to help develop an outstanding leadership project based on one of our film classics, "The Wizard of Oz."
The film's plot is easily condensed and allows for an immediate organizational behavioral approach that anyone can identify with: lonely and sad Kansas farm girl Dorothy Gale (her complete name) dreams of a better place, without torment against her dog Toto from a hateful neighbor spinster, so she plans to run away. During a fierce tornado, Dorothy is struck on the head and transported to a land (Munchkin Land) "beyond the rainbow" where she meets magical characters from her Kansas life transformed within her unconscious dream state. After travels down a Yellow Brick Road to the Land of Oz (Emerald City), and the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West, Dorothy and her friends (the Tin Woodman, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion) are rewarded by the great Wizard of Oz with their heart's desires - and Dorothy is enabled to return home to Kansas by locating the depths of her inner self. This brings me to our project and its valuable and entertaining perspective for us all to learn from the cast of characters.
When we think about the reasons that one must take better care of their life, it would be smart to begin thinking outside of the norm for your way of accepting the perceived. This is your first step to a new you - personal prosperity - and freedom from the chains of bondage. There are seven principles that each of us must take to begin the “long walk on a short path!” This text offers a transformation through my hunger for knowledge and my thirst for instruction. Yes, there is a difference between “hunger” and “thirst” and the seven inherent principles will not only define them for you, they will prepare you to accept your right to choose the future that is awaiting your new transformation into greatness.
The seven principles, if they were an apple, would allow me to take a bite to quench my hunger for change.
They are outlined as:
1. Think (the Future Picture)
2. Tongue (Words of Wisdom: Voice)
3. Transition the Mind (the Scarecrow)
4. Transform the Heart (the Tin Woodman)
5. Totality of Courage (the Cowardly Lion)
6. Tortuous (Full of Twists and Turns)
7. Toxic (Leadership, Behaviors, Values)
As we seek to experience change for our lives, we must first try to construct our future picture. This means that we must already know what we want our future to look like when we get there. This form of thinking allows each of us to examine a word that for some is the opposite of what they may be using (your actions) in life now; proactive, the opposite of procrastination. Being proactive places you on a path that limits negative things from happening.
Using the characters from the Wizard of Oz and over the next few weeks, Smith and I will use this Blog as a vehicle to outline the seven principles for change that anyone can use to make significant deposits in their life. You’ll see glaring similarities between your life experiences and those of Dorothy Gale from Kansas, the Cowardly Lion, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, Glenda -the Witch of the North, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Emerald City, and Munchkin Land. Your will be required to think “outside-the-box” for learning a new series of guiding principles.
Beginning with the first principle and throughout the entire text, it’s actually quiet simple. In order to plan a better future for yourself, like Dorothy Gale, all you have to do is think.
This text also offers a transformation that prepares you to accept your right to choose the necessary tools for finding your voice. It will inspire you to help others with finding theirs. The future awaits those who are proactive in their search for knowledge. Smith and I will attempt to entertain and prepare you for a significant walk into greatness.
Practicing her own principles, Smith released a “Monograph” version of her upcoming book, “A Long Walk On A Short Path,” for anyone who is seeking to make an immediate change. To get your copy, simply email me TODAY or contact Smith at lwsp@leslieasmith.com!
Publication Release Date: August 2008
Published by: Book Surge Publishing Company
Smith does an outstanding job and remains clever throughout her text keeping with the theme of Oz. Be prepared to learn, have fun, revisit your childhood, and GROW. This is one "NOT TO BE MISSED" and you will not be disappointed.
Thursday, April 3, 2008
The Monkey Dance & Great Teams
SATURDAY, MARCH 29, 2008
COOLEST BOOK TRAILER EVER!!
http://youtube.com/user/bisongroup
I’m not kidding. I’ve watched this book trailer at least a dozen times, and I still can’t get enough of it. The music is excellent. They video is simple and feels very organic. I love this thing! I have had the pleasure of speaking with the author, and I know a little bit about his passion and commitment to helping businesses building great teams, but who knew he could take that passion and make such a cool book trailer. If the video is this innovative and creative, it leads me to believe his book and concepts are equally as compelling. Nicely done and Semper Fi, Skipper. Kudos to your entire team. - R.W. RIDLEY, BLOG,
http://www.selfmarketingforbooks.com/
COOLEST BOOK TRAILER EVER!!
http://youtube.com/user/bisongroup
I’m not kidding. I’ve watched this book trailer at least a dozen times, and I still can’t get enough of it. The music is excellent. They video is simple and feels very organic. I love this thing! I have had the pleasure of speaking with the author, and I know a little bit about his passion and commitment to helping businesses building great teams, but who knew he could take that passion and make such a cool book trailer. If the video is this innovative and creative, it leads me to believe his book and concepts are equally as compelling. Nicely done and Semper Fi, Skipper. Kudos to your entire team. - R.W. RIDLEY, BLOG,
http://www.selfmarketingforbooks.com/
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
Building Great Teams: How to Manage the Process of Teams
A Monograph to Accompany Building Great Teams (Paperback)
by Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts (Author)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description: Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts answers the “how-to” question for leaders across the business marketplace on building great teams with a Monograph to accompany “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics.”
This monograph is a response to questions raised by readers in the business sector. It is not a new book. Skipper wants to avoid any confusion about the monograph being a book by limiting its distribution to online retailers. Based on interviews and workshops with over 100+ business sector executive education participant leaders, the difference between successful organizations and those that are not is their ability to build and manage the process of great team work.
Abstract
How to Build and Manage the Process of Teams: Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today's corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior leadership, and they must be committed to draft and manage the right team of commandos to lead the effort.
Yet, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naive to the complexities of team dynamics. Smart leaders and managers understand what type of team model best suits the task, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.
Product Details
Paperback: 40 pages
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing; 1 edition (2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1-4196-9172-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4196-9172-0
Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
by Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts (Author)
Editorial Reviews
Book Description: Damian D. “Skipper” Pitts answers the “how-to” question for leaders across the business marketplace on building great teams with a Monograph to accompany “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics.”
This monograph is a response to questions raised by readers in the business sector. It is not a new book. Skipper wants to avoid any confusion about the monograph being a book by limiting its distribution to online retailers. Based on interviews and workshops with over 100+ business sector executive education participant leaders, the difference between successful organizations and those that are not is their ability to build and manage the process of great team work.
Abstract
How to Build and Manage the Process of Teams: Building great teams hits at one of the most discussed topics within business media and the workplace: Organizational Behavior, leadership & process, and inter-office politics. The day of the individual worker is over, as today's corporate arena demands that workers possess the ability to effectively work as team-led associates within an organization. It is a scenario all top leaders and managers knows well: The organization, their people, and their systems all require efficient and effective processes to remain constant in its approach to move quickly toward new and innovative ways of reaching mission-critical objectives. This is a task that is directed by the senior leadership, and they must be committed to draft and manage the right team of commandos to lead the effort.
Yet, in most cases, team leaders never hit their goals – not because they lack talent within the associate ranks, but because they are naive to the complexities of team dynamics. Smart leaders and managers understand what type of team model best suits the task, what key skills to look for (and which to avoid), and how to coax top performances from everyone starting from day one.
Product Details
Paperback: 40 pages
Publisher: BookSurge Publishing; 1 edition (2008)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1-4196-9172-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-4196-9172-0
Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.8 x 0.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
Sunday, February 24, 2008
9TH Floor Leadership
Flexibility – What We Can Learn From “The Elevator”
Excerpt from “9TH Floor Leadership:”
The Strategy Of The Elevator That Some Executives Overlook And
Why It Matters Most! Transformational Leadership, People and Change
As in leadership, elevators are constantly moving. They remain constant, moving up and down, to transport individuals and items floor to floor. The ride never ends. It goes on and on, up and down, side to side until another person on a different floor pushes the button to call for the elevator.
Flexibility & the “Elevator” are defined as:
Moving up is said to be a promotion, a rise in status or success; Moving down a loss and sideways a lateral move, status quo. The elevator seems to indicate that you are on the go. You exceed your own expectations when you make wise decisions out of pure determination.
To learn more about “The Elevator” and the concept of “9TH Floor Leadership,” please contact me via email at: damian@buildtheteams.net. You will receive a complimentary “9TH Floor Leadership” framework and paradigm overview to your email within 3-business days. You will not be disappointed.
Excerpt from “9TH Floor Leadership:”
The Strategy Of The Elevator That Some Executives Overlook And
Why It Matters Most! Transformational Leadership, People and Change
As in leadership, elevators are constantly moving. They remain constant, moving up and down, to transport individuals and items floor to floor. The ride never ends. It goes on and on, up and down, side to side until another person on a different floor pushes the button to call for the elevator.
Flexibility & the “Elevator” are defined as:
Moving up is said to be a promotion, a rise in status or success; Moving down a loss and sideways a lateral move, status quo. The elevator seems to indicate that you are on the go. You exceed your own expectations when you make wise decisions out of pure determination.
To learn more about “The Elevator” and the concept of “9TH Floor Leadership,” please contact me via email at: damian@buildtheteams.net. You will receive a complimentary “9TH Floor Leadership” framework and paradigm overview to your email within 3-business days. You will not be disappointed.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Stateside Movie cast Skipper - IMDB
The film "Stateside" (2004) is a love story about two imperfect teenagers who find perfect love. The film follows the story of two teenagers from different worlds--Mark Deloach and Dori Lawrence--as their lives quickly spiral out of control. The rebellious but privileged Mark delves into dangerous antics resulting in a nearly fatal drunk driving accident, and Dori Lawrence, a wild actress and singer slowly loses touch with reality as she suffers from schizophrenia. Forced to straighten out their lives, Mark is sent to join the Marines and Dori is admitted into a mental hospital. In the midst of life's chaos, Mark and Dori are drawn to each other, recognizing their mutual desperation for love and understanding. Despite pressure from both their friends and family to keep their distance, they maintain their bond. While they fail to fix what's broken in each of their lives, they find comfort in each other's faults and have faith that their unconditional love will eventually heal their deep seeded wounds.
To learn more, visit http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339727/combined
To learn more, visit http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0339727/combined
Monday, February 11, 2008
Enterprise People Solutions Suite
Bison Group's Relationship Management Platform
The team here at The Bison Group helps organizations manage their most important asset – their people. We provide the leading platform of scalable leadership and organizational behavior solutions for enterprise learning, collaboration, performance management, and talent management, as well as implementation, training, and consulting services.
Unified People Management
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite is a comprehensive relationship management platform designed to align people processes to organizational goals. Why Us? It is our mission to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! It’s that simple. We understand that leadership development and Organizational Behavior is a companywide responsibility, stretching across all departments and functions. With this in mind during development and research, the team stands firm on our EPS business suite that is aligned with the highest integrated HumanSigma solutions with breakthrough principles to transformational leadership. Our platform delivers the greatest number of enterprise-wide implementations for learning and performance:
Shared-Platform, One Unified Solution!
Bison’s common platform simplifies the development of a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution by providing:
• A seamless user experience
• Simplified performance management reporting (assessment instruments)
• A common repository of people information, business objectives, and competencies
A common foundation means
• Easier deployment
• Lower implementation costs
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite involves a rigorous certification process that is designed for anyone who is charged with developing talent, leading a team, or achieving growth – no matter what industry or discipline – integrating transformational leadership, HumanSigma & change, diversity education, team building maneuvers, strategic planning, project management, performance management assessment instruments, and Flawless Execution – and we’ll provide the lasting experience that grooms high potential leaders to blaze new trails into the future.
The LeaderShaping process improvement methods will help you focus value-based strategies to:
▪ Achieve personal-organizational mastery and rigor to win in competitive
environments
▪ Build your transformational resilience
▪ Improve customer satisfaction through effective coaching to your people
▪ Advance product and service quality
▪ Drive performance management for business results
▪ Develop environments of trust for improved command and control
▪ Reduce waste and costs
▪ Increase speed and efficiency
Our Enterprise People Solutions suite will also teach you to use execution methods from the United States Marine Corps in business, health, government and community relations, Not-for-Profit and faith-based organizations, and service-related industries to improve, redesign, and implement efficient, people-centric business processes. LeaderShaping strategic principles-based methods will change how you build relationships with your people and manage your business to sustain positive change into the future. Its structure drives how management will make reality-based decisions and requires a significant commitment from all levels within an organization, especially at the top. Take a look at the different suites.
1. The LeaderShaping Learning Suite
2. The LeaderShaping Performance Suite
3. The LeaderShaping Talent Management Suite
4. The LeaderShaping HumanSigma Suite
To learn more about our Relationship Management Platform, email us at:
Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
The team here at The Bison Group helps organizations manage their most important asset – their people. We provide the leading platform of scalable leadership and organizational behavior solutions for enterprise learning, collaboration, performance management, and talent management, as well as implementation, training, and consulting services.
Unified People Management
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite is a comprehensive relationship management platform designed to align people processes to organizational goals. Why Us? It is our mission to LeaderShape people to cause transformational change! It’s that simple. We understand that leadership development and Organizational Behavior is a companywide responsibility, stretching across all departments and functions. With this in mind during development and research, the team stands firm on our EPS business suite that is aligned with the highest integrated HumanSigma solutions with breakthrough principles to transformational leadership. Our platform delivers the greatest number of enterprise-wide implementations for learning and performance:
Shared-Platform, One Unified Solution!
Bison’s common platform simplifies the development of a comprehensive Human Capital Management solution by providing:
• A seamless user experience
• Simplified performance management reporting (assessment instruments)
• A common repository of people information, business objectives, and competencies
A common foundation means
• Easier deployment
• Lower implementation costs
Our Enterprise People Solutions (EPS) suite involves a rigorous certification process that is designed for anyone who is charged with developing talent, leading a team, or achieving growth – no matter what industry or discipline – integrating transformational leadership, HumanSigma & change, diversity education, team building maneuvers, strategic planning, project management, performance management assessment instruments, and Flawless Execution – and we’ll provide the lasting experience that grooms high potential leaders to blaze new trails into the future.
The LeaderShaping process improvement methods will help you focus value-based strategies to:
▪ Achieve personal-organizational mastery and rigor to win in competitive
environments
▪ Build your transformational resilience
▪ Improve customer satisfaction through effective coaching to your people
▪ Advance product and service quality
▪ Drive performance management for business results
▪ Develop environments of trust for improved command and control
▪ Reduce waste and costs
▪ Increase speed and efficiency
Our Enterprise People Solutions suite will also teach you to use execution methods from the United States Marine Corps in business, health, government and community relations, Not-for-Profit and faith-based organizations, and service-related industries to improve, redesign, and implement efficient, people-centric business processes. LeaderShaping strategic principles-based methods will change how you build relationships with your people and manage your business to sustain positive change into the future. Its structure drives how management will make reality-based decisions and requires a significant commitment from all levels within an organization, especially at the top. Take a look at the different suites.
1. The LeaderShaping Learning Suite
2. The LeaderShaping Performance Suite
3. The LeaderShaping Talent Management Suite
4. The LeaderShaping HumanSigma Suite
To learn more about our Relationship Management Platform, email us at:
Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change
This "abstract" from the white paper introduces an essential guide for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results as we start a new year. As we begin to make our year’s resolutions, it might be wise to include one for your valued and trusted associates who are responsible for keeping the pistons firing in the organizational engine that drives performance.
There seems to be, with some of us, an erroneous perspective about how we look and think about the topic of leadership. As times change, shouldn’t the way people who are chosen as leaders tend to influence change? The misconception is that leadership changes independent of the people chosen to lead it. It does experience transition, whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not and whether we actively participate within that transition or not. It does not change on its own. As the individual’s perspective in life and reality take on new challenges – transition in ideation, transformative thought, the technology changes that drive our perspective on getting things done, and the changing environments reflective through the constant design and development of our ideals, values, and beliefs – so does the way of leadership.
We are aware of these huge incessant issues such as the Iraq war and the sectarian struggles that are causing human life to be lost, the environment, education, employment, politics, economics and such like and we drown in a sea of information about them, as they migrate like locust in our lives, day-in and day-out. The erroneous perspective extends on this tide until these problems and challenges seem so disconnected from each other and so alien to our personal circumstances that we think we are disadvantaged and too unimportant to make any difference.
We become ambivalent and detached from them, desensitized in a way that we begin to believe that we are all unable to overcome the challenges and enormous gravity of the situation. Moreover, we think we have no responsibility for them. But it is just that: an erroneous perspective! We think that to change the organizations with which we work, we must change the organization that resides around us. Nothing else makes any difference. However, as the title of this text suggests, change comes from within, not without. It is powered by the minds of each of us. It is engineered by the words from your mouth and the actions of your behaviors. It is constructed by your hands, as we are all responsible for it and influenced by it, whether directly or indirectly. It is so very clear to me that to change our environments – business, personal, relationships, etc – we must begin by changing ourselves.
The challenges and problems that face us in life’s journey do not exist within the depths of our media; they lie within each of us. They are created by us and we must be prepared to accept the “truth” delivered by our own level of influence and the consequences of our actions – our behaviors and our means to deliver the expected performance within the environment that we are a part of. “Your actions carry a thought and shape a destiny!” Simply, there is a reciprocal relationship between environments and behaviors and to achieve a successful transformational change medium, people must remain on a continuum of being “LeaderShaped!” This leads me to an all too familiar statement within my executive team; many, most, and some: “Many have wanted it; most think they have it, and some will actually get it.” Despite our perceptions to the contrary, the three perspectives are either a result of our passive acceptance that we can do nothing about them or our active role in encouraging them, or we can acknowledge our current place and decide to make a change for the better.
So, we have a choice. You have a choice. Accept the reality that we have made for what it is and allow change to occur with you as a passive participant in it, or look at your life and begin wondering: It is what it is? Does it get any better? Is this the best my reality and the reality of the world can be? “LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change” is my way of answering these very pointed questions for my own existence. My answer is absolutely, and without any doubt, NO!
This text is the starting point for you to begin the path of change for you and the people influenced by you and within your environment of trust. To get a full copy of the white paper, "LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change," email us at Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
There seems to be, with some of us, an erroneous perspective about how we look and think about the topic of leadership. As times change, shouldn’t the way people who are chosen as leaders tend to influence change? The misconception is that leadership changes independent of the people chosen to lead it. It does experience transition, whether we like it or not, whether we recognize it or not and whether we actively participate within that transition or not. It does not change on its own. As the individual’s perspective in life and reality take on new challenges – transition in ideation, transformative thought, the technology changes that drive our perspective on getting things done, and the changing environments reflective through the constant design and development of our ideals, values, and beliefs – so does the way of leadership.
We are aware of these huge incessant issues such as the Iraq war and the sectarian struggles that are causing human life to be lost, the environment, education, employment, politics, economics and such like and we drown in a sea of information about them, as they migrate like locust in our lives, day-in and day-out. The erroneous perspective extends on this tide until these problems and challenges seem so disconnected from each other and so alien to our personal circumstances that we think we are disadvantaged and too unimportant to make any difference.
We become ambivalent and detached from them, desensitized in a way that we begin to believe that we are all unable to overcome the challenges and enormous gravity of the situation. Moreover, we think we have no responsibility for them. But it is just that: an erroneous perspective! We think that to change the organizations with which we work, we must change the organization that resides around us. Nothing else makes any difference. However, as the title of this text suggests, change comes from within, not without. It is powered by the minds of each of us. It is engineered by the words from your mouth and the actions of your behaviors. It is constructed by your hands, as we are all responsible for it and influenced by it, whether directly or indirectly. It is so very clear to me that to change our environments – business, personal, relationships, etc – we must begin by changing ourselves.
The challenges and problems that face us in life’s journey do not exist within the depths of our media; they lie within each of us. They are created by us and we must be prepared to accept the “truth” delivered by our own level of influence and the consequences of our actions – our behaviors and our means to deliver the expected performance within the environment that we are a part of. “Your actions carry a thought and shape a destiny!” Simply, there is a reciprocal relationship between environments and behaviors and to achieve a successful transformational change medium, people must remain on a continuum of being “LeaderShaped!” This leads me to an all too familiar statement within my executive team; many, most, and some: “Many have wanted it; most think they have it, and some will actually get it.” Despite our perceptions to the contrary, the three perspectives are either a result of our passive acceptance that we can do nothing about them or our active role in encouraging them, or we can acknowledge our current place and decide to make a change for the better.
So, we have a choice. You have a choice. Accept the reality that we have made for what it is and allow change to occur with you as a passive participant in it, or look at your life and begin wondering: It is what it is? Does it get any better? Is this the best my reality and the reality of the world can be? “LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change” is my way of answering these very pointed questions for my own existence. My answer is absolutely, and without any doubt, NO!
This text is the starting point for you to begin the path of change for you and the people influenced by you and within your environment of trust. To get a full copy of the white paper, "LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change," email us at Sales@BisonGroupUS.com.
Team Intelligence
Is there such a thing as team intelligence? If there was, it would revolutionize the study and the practice of business. Our research shows that there is such a thing, that we can identify, describe, measure and develop it and that this has measurable business outcomes in terms of enterprise profitability, growth, and development. This has major implications for leadership development and talent management, to mention just two areas.
Idiots Savants and PhDs?
Traditionally psychologists defined intelligence as IQ, the intelligence quotient notably popularized by Binet and others. These days it is recognized that IQ is but one measure of intelligence, broadly defined. The working theory is that there are multiple intelligences, each of which is separate and defines a different form of cognitive performance. Thus we can talk about emotional, artistic, and kinesthetic intelligence. But no-one has even identified an entity such as team intelligence? Yet if these others exist, why should not team intelligence?
Popular culture identifies and discusses capabilities that could well be seen as direct reflections of team intelligence. These include business acumen and a nose for driving people, process, profit, and profitability. We sometimes talk of people being a “leadership genius.” Thus the popular wisdom acknowledges something that would be like team intelligence. It’s just that the academics and psychologists haven’t caught up yet since they are usually not in a position to have direct, as distinct from indirect, experience of it in the field in a real business. Simply, team intelligence should be constructed as a significant discipline in our business schools and development programs.
Another IQ! But Why?
That is where the work of The Bison Group comes in – a team of United States Marines turned business professionals and industry specialists, providing business acumen assessment and development program that focuses on people, process, and the disciplines of transformational leadership and organizational behavior. Our research shows that we can identify specific team intelligence at the level of the individual, which encapsulates successful environments at the organizational level. We can formally model that intelligence, measure it, and show what its impacts are on the team performance aspect of the individual and organization they are a part. Some of this work is introduced in the release of our latest book, “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (BookSurge, 2008), see www.amazon.com and our essential guidebook for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results – HumanSigma.Net.
Rather than use the all too familiar term IQ, we approach this discipline with another term, LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change. With the current economic downturn and its impact on leadership development practices and programs, organizations must remain on task with developing their people and systems and there’s no better time than now to get it done. The book and white paper combined examines people and organizational leadership using business acumen and United States Marine Corps strategy and tactical-philosophy as a multi-dimensional approach to creating an environment with significant HumanSigma to effect proactive change. Together, they argue that while recessions typically bring discouragement and fear to the workplace at all levels, there are good reasons for it to be different this time, as long as HR and leadership development professionals take the initiative.
Essentially, they examine, explain, and introduce strategy-execution and team intelligence.
Our definition of team intelligence, however, is not just or even mainly about team building. It is really about value creation in people. We identify the criticality of an individual or team to create capital, and that means in any level of an organization and system. In its specific implementation currently it uses organizational behavior as the lead stimulus that seeks to understand, explain, and improve human behavior in organizations. Team Intelligence using organizational behavior identifies profit intelligence, the propensity to create human capital as measured in successful workplace behaviors and environments.
Leaders Today
Who is better to train future leaders than the leaders of today? The business world is quickly realizing potential leaders are a major asset – the drivers of systems, management, and business process. Taking that potential and developing it is highly desirable. Team Intelligence is the tool that must be integrated if to achieve the difference between winning or losing in competitive situations. Using it wisely and as a significant applicable resource, Team Intelligence becomes the stimulus to initiate and maintain the relationship necessary to create leaders from leaders. With dedication from both the mentor and the protégé, the discipline guides participants through various steps to ensure it follows the right path that will benefit all parties. Team Intelligence models a value-add and results-oriented perspective that will help the leaders of today develop the leaders of tomorrow.
Most organizations focus their efforts on improving two aspects of human behavior:
Job performance: the degree to which individuals perform the behaviors needed for the organization to achieve its goals; and
Organizational commitment: the degree to which employees remain loyal to the organization rather than withdrawing from their work.
Using Team Intelligence, you can learn how to guide the integration of an adaptable model that seeks to explain these two areas of organizational behavior. That model is shown below, and will serve as the organizing framework for integrating Team Intelligence into any existing system and/or organization.
Team Intelligence is measured using online assessment instruments. The instruments also measure the actual behavior of an individual and show how this differs from their values and workplace motivators. These show whether the individual or team is likely to under- or out-perform other people in terms of creating profitable environments to their organizations (and higher market value). Our instruments also measure the leadership signature or culture of an organization and reveal what the type of team culture means for the ultimate market value of the company.
Recessions and economic downturns normally see a reduction in transformational leadership and development program spending since companies typically do not have confidence that these programs can provide short-term solutions to the financial issues that must be addressed. This is a significant misnomer and can produce a detachment for employing creative and innovative ways of achieving significant growth.
However, companies have an unparalleled opportunity to transform both leadership development programs and the way that they introduce creative programs to modify the financial behavior of their organization, including business acumen programs. These have the potential for rapid financial impacts to help in the short and long-term and to position them better as they come out of the stalling economy.
LeaderShaping the Future
Our work comes up with some surprising and, for many, counter-intuitive conclusions. Being one of the best leader types does not correlate with having the best team intelligence; in fact the reverse is more likely to be the case. The possession of a higher degree or an MBA is not correlated with high team intelligence. In fact, business outcomes may be worse with an MBA because the holder incorrectly assumes that they have the right business acumen for the assigned task. This over-confidence leads to rash decisions based on a lack of real-world experience – a model that the U.S. Armed Forces learned the hard way during the Vietnam War.
Simply placing new officers in command of troops already in country caused discontent, disharmony, and loss of life. They quickly learned that creative methods and a non-traditional approach was necessary as a model within itself to overcome the challenges faced by following the traditions that worked in the past. Just as time changes, so should the ways in traditional thinking.
The concept of team intelligence has some revolutionary implications for business. If it is correct, we are routinely selecting the wrong types of people as leaders and managers, which is probably why we get recurrent business and organizational crises such as the current sub-prime crisis in our financial communities.
Secondly we have completely the wrong development regimes and programs for managers and emerging leaders, since we might be measuring and managing the wrong things.
Third, our business education both at university and in business is based on the wrong skills since we are confusing business literacy and business acumen, which are completely different things. We routinely select for business literacy, which is not the same thing as business acumen and therefore suffer the consequences when holders of these often-atmospheric qualifications, apparently unaccountably, fail to deliver the right P&L results. This is where we come in again. A great way to learn the discipline of team intelligence, individuals must employ our program, “LeaderShaping the Future – Organizational Behavior: Harness the Potential of Tomorrow’s Leaders Today!”
This is a 40-hour intense business program that introduces “The Five Paragraph Order” concept as a significant tool within team intelligence. The Five Paragraph Order, otherwise known by its short name and acronym “SMEAC,” follows a set of well disciplined campaign precepts to build the foundation for integrating team intelligence. If these campaign precepts are followed correctly (they are applicable to any situation in any industry), your chances of success will gain valuable resources to win in any environment.
Situation (Manage by mind, lead by heart),
Mission (See what all see; think what no other thinks),
Execution (Master transition; develop the discipline of managing the unexpected),
Administration/ Logistics (Link leadership to legacy! Exploit the dynamic within, develop it without), and
Command and Signal (Hunt for great behavior; become a teacher of dignified coaches – ensure progression of authority)
Counting on the Multiples
So what does this all mean for the theory of multiple intelligence? Well, our work supports and extends it even further. As outlined in our first book, “The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership” (Kendall Hunt Publishing Co, 2007) see www.amazon.com, team intelligence is aligned with the art of employing democracy in leadership. Team intelligence most importantly demonstrates an understanding of excellence thru performance management that realizes a state where people come into a single way of thinking, without losing their individuality, creating a “shared-vision” that achieves a predetermined objective.
It shows that glorious entity called the human psyche and how it is even more multi-faceted and powerful than we had imagined. In doing so, team intelligence deconstructs types of influence, stratagem, and execution that require a response to the demand contribution and persuasion on policy and practice. It eliminates opportunities of enlisting archaic perspectives, offering a body of knowledge that channels enthusiastic initiatives without stifling potential for greater human and operational endeavors. It offers a collective commitment for winning, using educational leadership as an everyday event; a state with “fluidity,” ongoing and always in motion and the “vitality” within a system through its vision (and common orientation point) that finds a “voice.”
Not only does it have some far reaching capabilities in the analytical, emotional, artistic and kinesthetic areas, but it also has unsuspected abilities in the strictly financial area that also differentiate us as beings and people. It emphasizes the criticality of strategic leadership, strategy formulation and implementation, technology management and innovation. It helps individuals to drive fundamental change, achieving communal commitment, and unified frameworks that employs an intense, custom learning experience for enabling team leaders and their associates to increase their leadership ability – personally and professionally. It is at that point that they are equipped to apply the knowledge paradigms and tools across team-centric environments to win. Team intelligence is definitely, “not” business as usual and once we harness the abilities comprehended in this newest form of intelligence, we can leverage people to improve as human beings – the journey from ordinary people to extraordinary individuals.
But first we must recognize the existence of this new set of capabilities. It is important that we do not pass it off as a fad that will come and go. It is critical that we do not ignore this intelligence, but recognize that we have identified yet another facet of human ingenuity and power and, moreover, that it is unlikely to be the last.
Transition: Your Paradigm of Choice must Influence Your Paradigm of Change – Leadership that Is
The theory of team intelligence has far-reaching implications for talent management, leadership development and HR in companies everywhere. For a start, it implies that in using traditional personality and competency assessments to improve business outcomes and results, they have been barking up the wrong tree.
Traditional personality and competency assessments are simply measuring the wrong things so they cannot help improve business outcomes from a strictly team-centric perspective that immediately impacts the workplace. That is not to say they might not improve other outcomes such as the quality of leadership and project functioning.
But we cannot confuse leadership with business outcome, as is usually the case right now in most leadership development and talent management programs. This implies that most leadership development programs are simply not using their money wisely, or at the very least, claiming wrongly that they lead to results that they simply are not capable of.
Recommendations
Using leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps, explore what it takes to become a great leader in the workplace.
Integrate business acumen and talent management protocol to overcome organizational and inter-office politics, outlining the six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
Demonstrates how ordinary women can move up in the corporate world by shaping their own attitudes about success, prejudice, oppression, equality, business and leadership.
Educate C-Level executives, management and project teams in the discipline of team intelligence.
Idiots Savants and PhDs?
Traditionally psychologists defined intelligence as IQ, the intelligence quotient notably popularized by Binet and others. These days it is recognized that IQ is but one measure of intelligence, broadly defined. The working theory is that there are multiple intelligences, each of which is separate and defines a different form of cognitive performance. Thus we can talk about emotional, artistic, and kinesthetic intelligence. But no-one has even identified an entity such as team intelligence? Yet if these others exist, why should not team intelligence?
Popular culture identifies and discusses capabilities that could well be seen as direct reflections of team intelligence. These include business acumen and a nose for driving people, process, profit, and profitability. We sometimes talk of people being a “leadership genius.” Thus the popular wisdom acknowledges something that would be like team intelligence. It’s just that the academics and psychologists haven’t caught up yet since they are usually not in a position to have direct, as distinct from indirect, experience of it in the field in a real business. Simply, team intelligence should be constructed as a significant discipline in our business schools and development programs.
Another IQ! But Why?
That is where the work of The Bison Group comes in – a team of United States Marines turned business professionals and industry specialists, providing business acumen assessment and development program that focuses on people, process, and the disciplines of transformational leadership and organizational behavior. Our research shows that we can identify specific team intelligence at the level of the individual, which encapsulates successful environments at the organizational level. We can formally model that intelligence, measure it, and show what its impacts are on the team performance aspect of the individual and organization they are a part. Some of this work is introduced in the release of our latest book, “Building Great Teams: Charting the Path of Organizational Politics” (BookSurge, 2008), see www.amazon.com and our essential guidebook for building your transformational resilience, providing the needed coaching to your people, and driving performance management for business results – HumanSigma.Net.
Rather than use the all too familiar term IQ, we approach this discipline with another term, LeaderShaping People and Transformational Change. With the current economic downturn and its impact on leadership development practices and programs, organizations must remain on task with developing their people and systems and there’s no better time than now to get it done. The book and white paper combined examines people and organizational leadership using business acumen and United States Marine Corps strategy and tactical-philosophy as a multi-dimensional approach to creating an environment with significant HumanSigma to effect proactive change. Together, they argue that while recessions typically bring discouragement and fear to the workplace at all levels, there are good reasons for it to be different this time, as long as HR and leadership development professionals take the initiative.
Essentially, they examine, explain, and introduce strategy-execution and team intelligence.
Our definition of team intelligence, however, is not just or even mainly about team building. It is really about value creation in people. We identify the criticality of an individual or team to create capital, and that means in any level of an organization and system. In its specific implementation currently it uses organizational behavior as the lead stimulus that seeks to understand, explain, and improve human behavior in organizations. Team Intelligence using organizational behavior identifies profit intelligence, the propensity to create human capital as measured in successful workplace behaviors and environments.
Leaders Today
Who is better to train future leaders than the leaders of today? The business world is quickly realizing potential leaders are a major asset – the drivers of systems, management, and business process. Taking that potential and developing it is highly desirable. Team Intelligence is the tool that must be integrated if to achieve the difference between winning or losing in competitive situations. Using it wisely and as a significant applicable resource, Team Intelligence becomes the stimulus to initiate and maintain the relationship necessary to create leaders from leaders. With dedication from both the mentor and the protégé, the discipline guides participants through various steps to ensure it follows the right path that will benefit all parties. Team Intelligence models a value-add and results-oriented perspective that will help the leaders of today develop the leaders of tomorrow.
Most organizations focus their efforts on improving two aspects of human behavior:
Job performance: the degree to which individuals perform the behaviors needed for the organization to achieve its goals; and
Organizational commitment: the degree to which employees remain loyal to the organization rather than withdrawing from their work.
Using Team Intelligence, you can learn how to guide the integration of an adaptable model that seeks to explain these two areas of organizational behavior. That model is shown below, and will serve as the organizing framework for integrating Team Intelligence into any existing system and/or organization.
Team Intelligence is measured using online assessment instruments. The instruments also measure the actual behavior of an individual and show how this differs from their values and workplace motivators. These show whether the individual or team is likely to under- or out-perform other people in terms of creating profitable environments to their organizations (and higher market value). Our instruments also measure the leadership signature or culture of an organization and reveal what the type of team culture means for the ultimate market value of the company.
Recessions and economic downturns normally see a reduction in transformational leadership and development program spending since companies typically do not have confidence that these programs can provide short-term solutions to the financial issues that must be addressed. This is a significant misnomer and can produce a detachment for employing creative and innovative ways of achieving significant growth.
However, companies have an unparalleled opportunity to transform both leadership development programs and the way that they introduce creative programs to modify the financial behavior of their organization, including business acumen programs. These have the potential for rapid financial impacts to help in the short and long-term and to position them better as they come out of the stalling economy.
LeaderShaping the Future
Our work comes up with some surprising and, for many, counter-intuitive conclusions. Being one of the best leader types does not correlate with having the best team intelligence; in fact the reverse is more likely to be the case. The possession of a higher degree or an MBA is not correlated with high team intelligence. In fact, business outcomes may be worse with an MBA because the holder incorrectly assumes that they have the right business acumen for the assigned task. This over-confidence leads to rash decisions based on a lack of real-world experience – a model that the U.S. Armed Forces learned the hard way during the Vietnam War.
Simply placing new officers in command of troops already in country caused discontent, disharmony, and loss of life. They quickly learned that creative methods and a non-traditional approach was necessary as a model within itself to overcome the challenges faced by following the traditions that worked in the past. Just as time changes, so should the ways in traditional thinking.
The concept of team intelligence has some revolutionary implications for business. If it is correct, we are routinely selecting the wrong types of people as leaders and managers, which is probably why we get recurrent business and organizational crises such as the current sub-prime crisis in our financial communities.
Secondly we have completely the wrong development regimes and programs for managers and emerging leaders, since we might be measuring and managing the wrong things.
Third, our business education both at university and in business is based on the wrong skills since we are confusing business literacy and business acumen, which are completely different things. We routinely select for business literacy, which is not the same thing as business acumen and therefore suffer the consequences when holders of these often-atmospheric qualifications, apparently unaccountably, fail to deliver the right P&L results. This is where we come in again. A great way to learn the discipline of team intelligence, individuals must employ our program, “LeaderShaping the Future – Organizational Behavior: Harness the Potential of Tomorrow’s Leaders Today!”
This is a 40-hour intense business program that introduces “The Five Paragraph Order” concept as a significant tool within team intelligence. The Five Paragraph Order, otherwise known by its short name and acronym “SMEAC,” follows a set of well disciplined campaign precepts to build the foundation for integrating team intelligence. If these campaign precepts are followed correctly (they are applicable to any situation in any industry), your chances of success will gain valuable resources to win in any environment.
Situation (Manage by mind, lead by heart),
Mission (See what all see; think what no other thinks),
Execution (Master transition; develop the discipline of managing the unexpected),
Administration/ Logistics (Link leadership to legacy! Exploit the dynamic within, develop it without), and
Command and Signal (Hunt for great behavior; become a teacher of dignified coaches – ensure progression of authority)
Counting on the Multiples
So what does this all mean for the theory of multiple intelligence? Well, our work supports and extends it even further. As outlined in our first book, “The Art of Detachment: Breakthrough Principles to Transformational Leadership” (Kendall Hunt Publishing Co, 2007) see www.amazon.com, team intelligence is aligned with the art of employing democracy in leadership. Team intelligence most importantly demonstrates an understanding of excellence thru performance management that realizes a state where people come into a single way of thinking, without losing their individuality, creating a “shared-vision” that achieves a predetermined objective.
It shows that glorious entity called the human psyche and how it is even more multi-faceted and powerful than we had imagined. In doing so, team intelligence deconstructs types of influence, stratagem, and execution that require a response to the demand contribution and persuasion on policy and practice. It eliminates opportunities of enlisting archaic perspectives, offering a body of knowledge that channels enthusiastic initiatives without stifling potential for greater human and operational endeavors. It offers a collective commitment for winning, using educational leadership as an everyday event; a state with “fluidity,” ongoing and always in motion and the “vitality” within a system through its vision (and common orientation point) that finds a “voice.”
Not only does it have some far reaching capabilities in the analytical, emotional, artistic and kinesthetic areas, but it also has unsuspected abilities in the strictly financial area that also differentiate us as beings and people. It emphasizes the criticality of strategic leadership, strategy formulation and implementation, technology management and innovation. It helps individuals to drive fundamental change, achieving communal commitment, and unified frameworks that employs an intense, custom learning experience for enabling team leaders and their associates to increase their leadership ability – personally and professionally. It is at that point that they are equipped to apply the knowledge paradigms and tools across team-centric environments to win. Team intelligence is definitely, “not” business as usual and once we harness the abilities comprehended in this newest form of intelligence, we can leverage people to improve as human beings – the journey from ordinary people to extraordinary individuals.
But first we must recognize the existence of this new set of capabilities. It is important that we do not pass it off as a fad that will come and go. It is critical that we do not ignore this intelligence, but recognize that we have identified yet another facet of human ingenuity and power and, moreover, that it is unlikely to be the last.
Transition: Your Paradigm of Choice must Influence Your Paradigm of Change – Leadership that Is
The theory of team intelligence has far-reaching implications for talent management, leadership development and HR in companies everywhere. For a start, it implies that in using traditional personality and competency assessments to improve business outcomes and results, they have been barking up the wrong tree.
Traditional personality and competency assessments are simply measuring the wrong things so they cannot help improve business outcomes from a strictly team-centric perspective that immediately impacts the workplace. That is not to say they might not improve other outcomes such as the quality of leadership and project functioning.
But we cannot confuse leadership with business outcome, as is usually the case right now in most leadership development and talent management programs. This implies that most leadership development programs are simply not using their money wisely, or at the very least, claiming wrongly that they lead to results that they simply are not capable of.
Recommendations
Using leadership and performance principles from the U.S. Marine Corps, explore what it takes to become a great leader in the workplace.
Integrate business acumen and talent management protocol to overcome organizational and inter-office politics, outlining the six aspects of thinking politically in the exercise of leadership, team building and business.
Demonstrates how ordinary women can move up in the corporate world by shaping their own attitudes about success, prejudice, oppression, equality, business and leadership.
Educate C-Level executives, management and project teams in the discipline of team intelligence.
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