The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement
288The Power of Strategic Commitment: Achieving Extraordinary Results Through Total Alignment and Engagement
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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780814434406 |
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Publisher: | AMACOM |
Publication date: | 05/27/2009 |
Pages: | 288 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Josh Leibner (Bridgewater, NJ) and Gershon Mader (Toronto, Canada) are founding partners of Quantum Performance, Inc., a management consulting firm with global clients including Capital One, Cisco Systems, Prudential Financial, Cushman & Wakefield and many others.
Alan Weiss (East Greenwich, RI) is a consultant, speaker, and author whose consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients including Hewlett-Packard, Merck, and hundreds of other top organizations.
Read an Excerpt
INTRODUCTION
Let’s be honest. Most initiatives to improve organizational performance do not deliver. Whether the aim is to become leaner, more productive, customer-intimate, or growth-oriented, the majority of organizational programs fail to accomplish their goals. Most of these efforts don’t cut costs, improve productivity, boost customer satisfaction, or raise revenue to the levels that the organization’s leaders expected or promised to the board and Wall Street. Some initiatives, in fact, fail outright because of lack of ownership and follow-through. All in all, the track record of corporate initiatives is a sorry one—one that only Dilbert creator Scott Adams could take joy in.
Most senior managers understand that no matter how clear and valid their strategy and objectives are, if people are not genuinely on the same page working with each other, rather than against or independent of each other, they will not achieve the success they want. But these same managers don’t know how to generate real commitment and alignment to their strategies. One clear indication is the lack of enthusiasm that most senior managers exhibit for the strategic planning process. As one executive put it, “Strategic planning—that’s when you go offsite as a team, agree on a bunch of priorities for the year, then go back to work and do what you were going to do anyway.”
From our combined consulting experience spanning eighty-plus years, 500 clients, and sixty countries, working with companies of all types and at all levels, we have found that the root cause for most failed or unfulfilled strategies is not any actual shortcomings in the strategies themselves. In fact, we have seen brilliant strategies fail in the worst way—despite being exactly what the company needed at the time, well researched and analyzed, and presented compellingly at all levels.
The Power of Strategic Commitment teaches how true ownership and commitment, and not merely compliance, is achieved throughout an organization, even when the environment is filled with the typical toxic organizational issues of distrust, politics, turfism, butt-covering, blame, and timidity. The book addresses the role, for example, of a “chief commitment officer,” ways to build commitment that cost nothing, and the fallacy of money as a motivator for behavior change. Strategic commitment issues in nonprofits, education, and government, as well as traditional for-profits, are all covered.
Using this book, you’ll be able to identify apathy, resignation, and cynicism, and then transform them into an environment of total alignment and commitment within your organization. The process starts by sharpening your antennae to spot compliance masquerading as commitment, and understanding the six key drivers that ensure organizational commitment, even under the most dire of circumstances. Numerous real-life examples are given from Global 1000 executives who have succeeded using these tools. All of the quotes used in the book come from direct interviews or interactions with clients, or recollections from the individuals cited. Actual names were used when possible, with fictionalized names used in some cases.
This book is a modest insurance policy to guarantee that the $400,000 spent on strategic planning is, indeed, well spent.
Please note: Beginning with In Search of Excellence almost 30 years ago (1982, HarperCollins), people have carped that companies used as examples have often fallen out of favor. That’s because Peters and Waterman at the time, just as we are today, were using contemporary examples of sound processes. But variables often interfere: changed leadership, mergers, poor decisions, poor discipline, etc. We can’t ensure that our examples will stay true to strategic commitment, but we can laud those that were doing so when we wrote this.
—Josh Leibner
Bridgewater, New Jersey
—Gershon Mader
Toronto, Ontario
—Alan Weiss
East Greenwich, Rhode Island
December 2008
Excerpted from THE POWER OF STRATEGIC COMMITMENT. Copyright © 2009 by Josh Leibner and Gershon Mader. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.
All rights reserved. http://www.amacombooks.org.
Table of Contents
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1: Why Commitment TrumpsCompliance
Why Commitment Is More Important Than Ever
Chapter 2: What Is Strategic Commitment?
If It’s So Important, Why Don’t I Know About It?
Chapter 3: Working Back from the Future
How to Generate Strategic Commitment
Chapter 4: Pushing Through the Thermal Layer
How to Engage Middle Managers in Strategic
Commitment
Chapter 5: Leading from the Front
“Follow me!” (Not, “I’ll Be There in a Minute .?.?.”)
Chapter 6: Taking a Stand—The Key to Strategic Commitment
Why the Aztecs Put a Stake in the Ground
Chapter 7: Building and Restoring Trust
Essential Competencies for Generating StrategicCommitment
Chapter 8: Return on Strategic Commitment
On Competitive Edge and Profit Margins
Chapter 9: Lead, Follow, or Get Out of the Way—HR at the Crossroads
The Role of HR in Generating Strategic Commitment
Chapter 10: Strategic Commitment as Organizational Lifestyle
Integrating the Process into Organizational DNA
Chapter 11: The Diversity of Strategic Commitment
There Is No Such Thing as “But We’re Different”
Afterword: Strategic Commitment IsEssential in Volatile Economies
Appendix: Tips, Techniques, and Tools for Generating, Monitoring, and Addressing Setbacks Related to Strategic
Commitment
Index
About the Authors