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

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. What they share, apparently, is the capacity to deal with the key threats to superior performance: Conflict ; Complexity; Complacency.

Conflict should be understood as an important source of renewal rather than a deviation to be avoided, managed or mediated. Top performers view conflict as an asset containing powerful lessons about the marketplace or the flow of work.

Complexity is often carried beyond the point of utility. Many companies have stock-keeping units, pricing schemes, variations in products and highly evolved internal processes...only a small portion of which truly add value.

Complacency is the corrosive attitude of “good enough” that often infects functions, lines of business or even entire companies. Complacency is the thief of continuous improvement...often taking subtle forms that are difficult to combat.

Top performers address these threats, not directly, but by effectively integrating the three fundamental tools of management: Strategy; People; Systems.

Strategy helps to marshall an organizations resources into a unique, viable posture based on relative internal competencies, anticipated changes in the environment and the contingent moves of intelligent competitors.

People refers to the full range of human resource development, beginning with the self: personal mastery, partnering, team performance and inter-group adaptation, as well as the many organization design elements that drive culture and climate.

Systems encompass many dozens of protocols for order entry, product commercialization, major account management measurement and compensation.

Top performers recognize that it is not excellence in any one of these arenas, but careful integration and constant mutual adjustment that convert key threats into the drivers of superior performance: Energy; Focus; Innovation.

These are the real “dials” to watch. All strategic initiatives should show up outside the executive suite in a palpable shift in energy, greater focus and an enhanced capacity to innovate.

Let us partner with you in applying your Organization Development investment to sustaining these Great Company attributes.