Compressed Air Best Practices - February 2009 - (Page 41)

Compressed Air Industry POWER PLANTS | 02/09 | 3. It’s not about execution; it’s about focus. How many times have you heard a leader state, “We have the right strategy, but we can’t execute”? The fact is that without focus, any organization — from a football team to a huge multi-national corporation — will fail to achieve its goals. Generally, people do what they are rewarded to do. When there is confusion, the essential connection between the strategic plan and the work that gets done is critically compromised. The most impressive, albeit painful, way to gain focus is to go into crisis. Look at the heightened focus a crisis delivers to an organization. People immediately get on the same page, the value of the work is clearly perceived, teamwork is highly valued and individuals perform at peak levels. Some organizations operate using crisis management as a way to get things done. This is insane and unsustainable, but how do you drive focus into an organization without sacrificing rational and stable business practices? You must teach your organizations where it is okay to fail: What tasks are imperative to the health of the company and which ones — though important — can be compromised? This is difficult to do because failure is not traditionally taught in leadership courses. “Failure is not an option,” is a quip that has become part of our cultural lexicon. Not knowing where you are willing to fail means not being serious about success. Leaders must uncompromisingly communicate the critical path to success and do so at the individual level. Distractions abound, setbacks occur and deviation from the strategic plan happens before the ink on the document is dry. The organization that knows how to “mind its business” is the one that delivers on its vital promises. The most important question to ask about execution: “What is your focus?” “A recent. study reported in the Harvard Business School Press found that only one in 10 large company CEOs achieve their growth targets.” 4. Not knowing how to define success. This seems odd given that the strategic plan is all about illuminating a path to success, but when success has multiple definitions, there is neither a cohesive nor a unifying message for the organization. Worse yet, if you cannot define success internally, the chances of defining it for your clients are dramatically reduced. The bias, of course, is to measure success with reams of financial data. This is essential, as the DNA of a business is defined in numbers. Yet, numbers can do poor justice to the process of defining success. They can provide conflicting evidence of success, be internally focused to a fault and provide information on past performance rather than an accurate prediction of future outcomes. A vital job of a leader is to be able to decipher the difference: management is the collection of data; leadership is creating organizational action. The most important question to ask when defining success: “Are we successful, and if we are, how do we know?” Leaders fail because no matter how outstanding the strategic thinking, which is typically generated at the top of an organization, it is only as good as it is understood and executed at every level in the organization. John Baker is author of the newly released book, READY Thinking — Primed for Change. As a leadership expert, speaker and founder of READY Thinking, LLC, John has helped hundreds of organizations achieve success by adopting a practical framework of thinking during times of change and opportunity. He has more than 20 years experience as a senior executive with companies including American Express and Ameriprise Financial, specializing in sales, client loyalty and customer service. For more information, e-mail JohnBaker@ReadyThinking.com or visit www.ReadyThinking.com. www.airbestpractices.com 41 http://www.ReadyThinking.com http://www.airbestpractices.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Compressed Air Best Practices - February 2009

Compressed Air Best Practices - February 2009 Contents From the Editor Utility-Air News Compressed Air Audit of the Month Air Standards Instrument Air in Nuclear Power Plants Seven Sustainability Projects for Industrial Energy Savings The Pneumatic Advantage Personal Productivity Resources for Energy Engineers Wall Street Watch Advertiser Index Classifieds

Compressed Air Best Practices - February 2009

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