White Papers Archive
  The Accidental Leader
  Its lonely at the top
 
  Ten functions of today's planners
  In our experience, corporate planning departments
 
  Focus Group Results
  Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers?
 
  The Challenge of Strategy: Seven Lessons
  Managing Major Organizational Change: Key Elements
 
  Of Teams and Teambuilding
  All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way
 
  Three Dimensions of Leadership
  Knowledge is the distilled essence of our intuition, corroborated by experience
 
  Having a Great Company
  Want to have a great company? Across all industries and in a surprisingly broad range of economic conditions, only 6% - that’s about one in 17 - consistently out-perform their peers.
 
  Strategic Planning Committee
  Developing an Appropriate Fact-Base for Strategy Making
 
  Managing Major Organizational Change
  These principles give rise to approaches calling for the involvement of larger groups than are typically involved in a change process.
 
  Business Innovation…Table Stakes for "Stayin Alive"
  We often begin engagements with an intergroup competition calling for teams of people to assemble a "product" or achieve a goal by working together toward a "best of breed" solution.
 
  Kipp & Associates

Focus Group Results -
Ever wonder how your views on leadership stack up against those of your peers? Just what are most senior managers thinking about their evolving roles these days; what do they consider the enduring “right stuff”?
Over the past several months, a few surprising signals have emerged from CEO Focus Groups we’ve been conducting. In the interest of exploring the question, “what will leaders most need in order to prevail in the early part of the next Century”, we’ve listened to dozens of Chief Executive Officers from the corporate, voluntary and governmental sectors. They were encouraged to sort out their developmental needs as they saw them, and to determine how they were being addressed. We went into each session expecting to hear a lot about globalization, the velocity of change, converging technologies, “Asia Rising”, deregulation, and the difficulty of getting good people. We talked about all those things and more, but by the close of the session their concerns invariably crystallized into three categories:

· The Competencies to adapt to the market
· The Capacity to self renew
· The Wisdom to similarly enroll others.

Competencies to adapt

This was probably the least surprising, but there were a few insights worth reporting. The playing field is changing so rapidly that it’s an enormous challenge to determine how to adapt and just what the relevant competencies truly are. Strategic planning has moved beyond an administrative practice in which the “ruling coalition” sets performance targets, middle managers construct action programs and everyone else follows the “play book”. Strategy involves more capacity building than point-specific programming, and everyone must be encouraged to keep questions of market dynamics and requisite competencies alive. They noted that even cowards can stand pain; only the brave deal well with uncertainty. The temptation is to prematurely close out the discovery process with an air of “lead, follow or get the out of the way”.

The history of both commercial and personal failure is littered with stories of those who attempted to mold events to their preconceived notions rather than adapt. Arie deGuis, famous for his pioneering work in scenario planning at Royal Dutch Shell, is actually the champion of “what is” rather than “what if”. His observation on long-term survivors is that they exhibit a history of sensing what’s happening in their environment, responding to it more quickly than their competitors and learning from the consequences of their actions.

Then there are times when thoughtful reflection rather than decisive action is called for. A participant shared a wonderful teaching poem from the Native American tradition, recited to children who would ask their elders, “What do I do when I am lost in the forest?”

Lost

Stand still...the trees ahead and bushes beside you are not lost.
Wherever you are is called…Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it you may come back again, saying…Here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a branch does is lost on you,
Then you are surely lost. Stand still.
The forest knows where you are.
You must let it find you.

What’s New?

Mary Ann and Mike co-facilitated the weeklong Leadership Education Program for the Foundation for Community Encouragement.

Mary Ann delivered “Five Ways Managers Sabotage their Lives and Careers”, a component of her Executive Coaching program To Dream, To Discern, To Decide at the Peter Drucker “Management for the Millenium” summit.

Mike keynoted The American Cookware Manufacturer’s Association and the Logistics Roundtable with Seven Lessons in Strategy, and conducted a workshop on The Accidental Leader for the International Strategic Leadership Forum. More recently he was with the Veteran’s Affairs’ Clinical Leadership Institute facilitating a program on Leading through Storytelling.