TOCICO

Ambition in business requires an injection of healthy new thinking, a challenge to common practice. Growth is based on creating significant differentiators in the market place. Differentiation means addressing a market need in a way that no significant competitor can. Operations must achieve new levels of performance to support the emerging market offers. By definition – this requires management challenging their existing business beliefs and practices. Embarking on a growth strategy will stretch the current management to the limit. With increasing implementation success, management quickly becomes the organization’s ‘strategic constraint’. The organization will simply run out of management capacity. This question will constantly repeat itself: 'If you want to grow, who is on your team?' An interesting dilemma emerges due to the new demands placed on the company: A: Sustainable profitable growth B: Quantum levels of improvement. D: Focusing on major constraining activities / resources only. C: Ensure corporate stability D': Focus on incremental improvement. Management is the ultimate constraint of a business. The management resource must be developed throughout the organization. The direction of the solution lies in achieving quantum improvement with the experienced management. However, equal and parallel effort must be taken to develop the next generation, small incremental improvement is the opportunity to nurture, incubate and provide opportunity for the next generation to develop technical and teaming skills plus the confidence that improvement is always possible and managing change is the path to success. Companies that exhibit sustainable growth, also have a passion to develop and grow managers as a core strategy… constantly placing challenges and demands on managers. This becomes a type of natural selection, a process by which managers push each other to achieve higher levels of skill. Much the same as Olympians push each other to the highest level of performance. Examples include: General Electric Company, Sony Corporation etc. known as a place of people development as much as delivery of goods and service. These giants have pools of emerging talent that can be unleashed on new opportunities. Developing this type of organization requires a mindset change: primarily thinking of the organization as a 'Leadership Factory' producing leaders and managers, an environment where goods and service are second. Develop people and results will follow: the objective is to populate the company with competence. Learning objectives: 1. Management is the ‘strategic constraint ‘of any ambitious company. 2. Growth is not sustainable if experienced management cannot rely on a pool of emerging talent within the organization. 3. Incremental improvement is an opportunity to identify, incubate and develop the next generation on management. Likely questions: 1. Do we have to develop everybody in the organization? 2. What about the personalities that clash when pushed to excel – will create a negative competitive atmosphere? 3. How do you motivate those who just don’t want to learn, be challenged or even speak up in a meeting?