Presents a tailored high involvement clinic for building a vision of where you want to be in the future

Use high involvement techniques to develop a new powerful strategic direction! Build a vision to drive down cycle times in the workplace. Reduce overhead and costs. Focus on your customers in a new cohesive environment. Improve quality in the working environment and win back market share. Use team based approaches to enable you to become a fierce competitor.

A Team-building Strategic Planning Clinic

• Raise awareness and involve everyone in building a new direction.
• Develop a new competitive direction for your business and become more customer driven.
• Develop your own master plan while building a custom strategy for inducing radical change.
• Develop cohesiveness among your managers using a team building approach that focuses on results.
• Create a cohesive team environment through high involvement.
• Formulate teams to streamline processes, improve productivity and substantially reduce costs.
• Develop missions, goals and objectives for self-managing teams that vertically link with your company's strategic direction.
• Use a state-of-the-art tool to integrate the vision with annual business/budget planning, and daily operations.
• Develop measurable action plans to ensure success.
• Create accountabilities and link the new direction with performance measurement and reward systems.

Tough competition and regulations are driving companies to seek new ways of doing business. Large scale changes are being forced by market dynamics. Market shares are shifting. The pressure is on to be nothing less than the best. No industry is immune. But being the best takes radical change and it's no easy matter. You have to assume control of your future.

You have to streamline workflow, systems and organizations, and open up lines of communications. You have to break down barriers between departments and put an end to the we've always done it that way argument. You have to change old reward systems that have become obstacles in the path of progress. You have to get your employees highly involved in assuming new responsibilities if you're going to compete in the tough dynamic markets of the next decade.

Our Vision Building Clinic is a direct result of experiences reaching back to 1981, when we first began to work with cross-functional teams on projects implementing integrated manufacturing systems, and, later in 1985, cellular manufacturing. Working with both union and non-union based shops, we quickly realized that getting people involved early in the planning stages of a manufacturing cell greatly enhanced the chances of a successful implementation. We saw hands-on achievement of ownership and buy-in for change. Each cell member who assisted in the design of fixtures and cell layout later became a champion for change.

When teams were used to outline functional requirements for systems, groups of people cross-fertilized their individual ideas and knowledge and stimulated each other's thinking in the process. The groups became highly motivated and energized. The quality of the results in all cases far exceeded those when teams were not used. The successes of implementations clearly outperformed those that we were used to seeing. We realized that we had begun discovering new approaches to managing change in an organization. Since that time we have applied our experiences to the strategic planning effort. The result is our Vision Building Clinic that takes all of our experiences and integrates them with state-of-the-art concepts.

Our Vision Building Clinic is an in-house team-building intervention and workshop for both management and key employees. It integrates the principles of:

• Classic strategic planning
• High involvement
• Continuous learning
• Continuous improvement
• Power of vision
• Performance-based objectives
• Self-directed teams, and
• Reward for performance

It is designed to produce a series of performance-based personal objectives and action plans that are vertically and horizontally linked to your strategic plan, the annual business plan and reward system. But you might be asking yourself the question "why do anything at all?"

The Challenge

There is a clear need to get, and remain, fiercely competitive. It's no secret that over a 15 year period, the U.S. lost a significant market share in key industries: wide-bodied aircraft, semi-conductors, automobiles, electronics, and steel. There is no time to relax. A global resegmentation of markets has emerged, as we predicted in 1989. New economic powerhouses such as Singapore, Taiwan and China have redefined the rules of competition, and are exerting pressure on U.S. companies. It's a new economic game and the rules have changed.

Over the next ten years, most companies in the U.S., whether they are hospitals, insurance companies, banks, or manufacturers will be faced with stiff competition in most markets. Some will be facing an economic war on three fronts: regional, national, and international. We must concentrate on satisfying the demands of the market, which means designing and building the best quality product or service in the shortest time possible, and servicing our customers with world-class capability.

The next ten years will emphasize radical development of the corporate infrastructure, inducing major changes to the organization. The focus will be on quickly introducing new high quality products or services and delivering them with unprecedented lead times. The end result will be a new effective organizations capable of making swift decisions, and manufacturing products with high velocity. Large scale changes in the way we operate in the office and in the factory are required to achieve this degree of performance.

The questions at hand are:

• Where will you be 10 years from now?
• What will your company do? How will it become more competitive?
• What is needed to get and remain fiercely competitive?
• How can your company build a consensus for the future among managers?
• How can communication be improved throughout all levels in the company?
• What should the vision be that will energize your company to focus around its customers?
• How can benefits be realized through team-based management?
• Is the organization ready for change?
• How can employees begin to regain responsibility and accountability for work performed?
• What improvements will benefit your company the most? How will they be achieved?
• How can self-directed teams improve quality and speed?

The answers to these questions can be realized by developing a long-term approach that will change the dynamics and characteristics of the current organization. This clinic starts the process of transforming the organization into one that is dynamic, energized and customer-focused.

First: "hipshot" thinking. Too many strategic planning sessions are accomplished over a stint in a nice resort. The time is often compressed to a few days for such critical planning. Executives don't have much of a chance to think through their assignments. As a consequence, long range plans emerge from "hipshot" gestures made by beer-soaked brains.

Second: quite often only a few key executives are involved in the planning sessions. Functional departments may not be represented in a plan that consequently affects them. This result in having too narrow a functional representation, and few owners of the plan. The odds of accomplishing the plan is drastically reduced.

Third: when a plan is devised, it may not be authored by people below the first tier of management. The old paradigm is that the top executives are the best qualified to accomplish the planning. Since the participation is limited, those responsible for daily operations in the firm have no authorship in the future of the company: no "buy-in." Again, the chance of a successful implementation is reduced dramatically.

Fourth: when the strategic plan is finished, it often dies at the end of the sessions because it is not integrated with the annual business plan or the annual budget. In this instance, life goes on in the organization the same way it did before the strategic planning session. Nothing has changed and the plan collects dust. It is not a "living document" in any sense of the meaning.

Fifth: too few people are measured by the success or failure of the plan. If too few feet are held to the fire for the plan's outcome, it has little chance of success. We believe that you get what you measure. Measure the results of the plan, and you will get results.

Sixth: hardly anyone gets paid as a result of the success or failure of the strategic plan. Except for a few key executives who have objectives to meet to make their bonuses, pay systems generally tend to be mutually exclusive from the success of a strategic plan. Workers and salaried people, in addition to middle managers, are paid as a result of some obscure compensation system.

Seventh: individual and team efforts are seldom ever tied to the outcome of the company's strategy. Workers respond to how they are measured. They know that keeping the machines running increases utilization, that's what they have been taught that the company wants, and so they build inventory, even when its not needed.

Eighth: most workers, whether they be executives, salaried, or labor, don't know how to behave as a team member. Our society teaches us to be heroes, to worship heroes, and that we are rewarded for individualistic efforts. It starts in school with academic and sport competition. The hero is the pitcher with the most games won, or the quarterback with the most yards gained. We foster entrepreneurial efforts in business. Most team efforts in the company boardroom are feigned.

The overall quality of the long range plan increases substantially when executives have an opportunity to think through the ramifications of their actions. The best situation is when a plan is devised during one or two day sessions, twice a month, over a period of several months. This allows assignments to be given out in between sessions, and provides the executives a chance to spend more concentrated time on the assignment at home, or in the evenings when they are more relaxed.

The quality of each individual's contribution to the plan vastly improves. Then, the results of the assignments are brought in to the sessions and synthesized with the efforts of others to achieve a much higher quality plan.

Our Vision Building Clinic is a new way of tackling the problem. It's a vision building program that enables you to take the first step in becoming fiercely competitive. A vision focuses and energizes a new direction. Ownership empowers change. This clinic takes full advantage of both principles by utilizing high involvement of executives, managers and employees to build a vision and foster change.

The output of this effort is your company's actual strategic plan, with performance driven objectives and action plans, vertically and horizontally linked for all employees. We combine the effort with an awareness raising of state-of-the art business concepts and methodologies such as agility, cycle time reduction, just-in-time, business paradigms, concurrent engineering, etc. Each biweekly session features a key workshop topic that attendees can apply to your company.

This clinic is tailored to each company's special needs. We provide the facilitation, and methodology for developing a new direction. Contact us (click here) to arrange facilitation of our Vision Building Clinic.

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