Archive for the ‘Change Management’ Category
Experience Vistage on June 11 at Hacienda del Sol
May 6th, 2013 | 
Author: 
Every month Tucson Vistage members give up a day at the office to spend that day with 15 of their peers? Easy? No. Invaluable? Yes. Watch to find out why. Vistage Value
On June 11 join Tucson’s business leaders for a half day version of a Vistage CEO meeting. Enjoy a popular Vistage speaker leading you through an accelerated Strategic Planning exercise. Learn what it is like to explore a tough question or issue you are facing with the help of a room of your peers. Schedule an appointment to see if you qualify for membership in Tucson’s newest CEO Peer Advisory Group. That group is already 25 percent subscribed, including the President of one of Tucson’s largest aerospace companies.
Come as a guest. Full information here.
Posted in 
Vistage Members Report Continued Slowdown in Economic Growth
More than 1600 Vistage members surveyed in the Q4 Vistage CEO Confidence Index reported a continued slowdown in the pace of economic growth and anticipated overall economic conditions would remain subdued in the first half of 2013.
On the other hand, optimism among small business owners who took the WSJ/Vistage Small Business CEO Survey reversed last month’s decline as renewed economic growth offset concerns about political and economic uncertainty.
Below are some key highlights from the Q4 2012 Vistage CEO Confidence Index (all members surveyed):
- 63% of CEOs anticipated revenue growth during the year ahead in the fourth quarter survey, down from 73% last year.
- 49% of CEOs expected increased profits, down from 52% last quarter and 55% last year.
- 35% of CEOs at year end reported improving economic conditions, down from 60% at the start of 2012.
- Combined 86% of CEOs said higher sales, new orders, and an improving economy were the most important influences on increasing the likelihood of hiring new employees.
- Planned hiring fell to 45% in the fourth quarter of 2012, down from 55% in the fourth quarter of 2011.
See the remainder of the Q4 2012 Vistage CEO Confidence Index results with this interactive tool.
Below are some key highlights from the December Vistage/Wall Street Journal Small Business CEO Survey (members leading companies in the $1 million-$20 million range):
- 65% of small business firms expect their sale revenue to increase in the next year.
- 51% of small business firms expect their profitability to improve in the next year.
- 48% of small business firms say they plan to increase their hiring in the next year.
- 27% of small business firms think U.S. economic conditions in next year will be better than they are now, up from 20% in November.
See the remainder of the Wall Street Journal/Vistage Small Business CEO Survey results with this interactive tool.
Read The Wall Street Journal article about the Wall Street Journal/Vistage Small Business CEO Survey results, featuring a Vistage member.
Are Your Employee Evaluations Worth the Time and Paper It Takes to Do Them?
According to Denis Wilson, writing in Fast Company, annual evaluations “build up pressure and make feedback sessions feel like indictments. And most importantly, they do little to alter behavior and improve performance and productivity, which should be your goal.” If you’ve read Three Signs of a Miserable Job (if you supervise, manage, or lead—you must) by Patrick Lencioni, one of my favorite business authors, Lencioni asserts that there are three things often missing for most employees that create a great deal of dissatisfaction.
Immeasurement refers to an employee’s desire to know how their performance will be measured. It also hinders clarity regarding where to focus one’s time and attention. Irrelevance refers to an employee’s lack of understanding how their work and performance contributes to the company’s overall success. And anonymity refers to an employee’s feeling of generally not being known.
The boom-surprise-explode cycle of typical annual performance evaluations does little to alleviate these three conditions, although when done well and thoughtfully they can help. Instead, consider how you can transform an annual evaluation into an ongoing conversation that provides regular feedback on performance requirements derived directly from corporate strategy; promotes alignment with corporate culture; and for those who manage or lead provides important feedback on their number one job—the performance of the teams they lead.
With the turning of the calendar, this is a great time to consider a change in this area. There are many tools available. Our favorite is Evaluate to Win, based on the work of Vistage Member Lee Benson in Phoenix and on the management operating systems designed by former GE CEO Jack Welch. To read the complete Fast Company article, simply follow this link http://www.fastcompany.com/3004111/why-year-end-reviews-are-big-fat-waste-time.
What Lessons Can You Learn from Sam the Banana Man?
Samuel Zemurray, known to friend and foe alike as Sam the Banana Man, made his first fortune in “ripes,” bananas that the big fruit traders considered too mature to reach market in time for sale. Their rule of thumb was “One freckle turning, two freckles ripe”—thus consigning tons of fruit to a great reeking pile at the edge of the wharf, where it was pushed into the sea or simply left to rot.
When Zemurray, a young Russian immigrant, saw that first sad pile of ripes—circa 1895, in the port of Mobile, Ala.—he recognized his opportunity. For a man who spent his early years on a desolate wheat farm in Bessarabia, there was obvious value in even a freckled piece of fruit. By 1903, he was a mini mogul, with $100,000 in the bank. Here’s a list of Sam’s five lessons.
1. See for yourself.
2. Don’t try to be smarter than the problem.
3. Don’t trust the experts.
4. Money can be made again, but a lost reputation is gone forever.
5. When in doubt, do something!
What Myths are Impeding Change at Your Company?
At Bang & Olufsen, the Danish manufacturer of high end music players and speakers, its people were convinced that their success depended on providing the ultimate pureness of sound, creating beautiful objects, delighting users through great physical product interfaces, and thinking of music as a home experience. As a result, it has viewed architects and industrial designers as the best interpreters of customers’ aspirations. While these myths worked for quite some time to keep Bang & Olufsen as industry leaders, these same myths prevented Bang & Olufsen from reacting to the rise of MP3 digital encoding.
As we know, MP3 technology has radically changed the world of music by making music more accessible, shareable, and embedded in the net–but not at the standards set out by Bang & Olufsen people. What myths are impeding change at your company? Read more at the Harvard Business Review Blog.
What Do Lottery Tickets and Change Management Have in Common?
In this Harvard Business Review article, a famous experiment demonstrated that when participants who had chosen their own lottery numbers were offered an opportunity to sell the ticket back, they typically wanted five times the price asked by those who had been assigned random numbers. In other words, when we choose for ourselves, we are far more committed to the outcome — by a factor of five to one.
Conventional approaches to change management underestimate this impact. The rational thinker sees it as a waste of time to let others self-discover what he or she already knows — why not just tell them and be done with it? Unfortunately this approach steals from others the energy needed to drive change that comes through a sense of ownership of “the answer.”