Future-Focused Organization Complete Organizational Alignment for Breakthrough Success

Let's reflect on the evolution of organizational models in corporate America. We have witnessed various trends of centralized versus decentralized, structured versus unstructured, functional verses team based, matrix management, delayered flat structures, roulette wheel structures, top-down and bottom-up, formal versus informal, and probably many other approaches to managing organizations. Today, management is not sure when it should plan, control, delegate, empower, intervene, or create another team to solve the company's problems. One executive commented recently, "We used to have functional silos. Now we have a whole barnyard of programs and teams, and to be honest I've lost track of what they're all doing." As a result, many executives are struggling with how to continue this evolution of repositioning their organizations to compete globally in the 21st century. The focus of this book is on helping an organization and its leadership to develop a future-focused strategic business development and deployment process. This book answers the question of how the organization should rapidly adjust and redeploy resources so that it will always be in the leadership position in its marketplace. We refer to this model as the future-focused organization. This organization provides the underpinnings of success by bringing the terms agile, fluid, or seamless to life through people. This new model is also a must for those organizations pursuing revolutionary change through reengineering or seeking the next level of excellence in their total quality management, cycle time reduction, or other continuous improvement efforts. This future-focused strategic business process is a radical change from the widely practiced and popular POSDCER process of plan, organize, staff, delegate, check, execute, and then replan. The future-focused strategic business process outlined in this book puts the executive team in the do loop by specifying their duties on how to deploy the plan so that it is achieved in the most timely and efficient manner for the organization. The planning and deployment of corporate strategic direction must have a cycle time measure. The future-focused strategic business process utilizes the organizational resources effectively and efficiently. The planning and deployment of business strategy must not be a valueless and disruptive yearly event to the organization. In many organizations that we have worked with the strategic business planning and deployment process is dreaded because it is an event-based process. The output of the event is a document that is bookshelf bound and not results bound. Planning and deployment must be a real-time process, performed by 100% of the work force. Stated another way, organizational agility and adjustment must become a people-driven process that is as natural as breathing. This future-focused strategic business process helps the organization to know what to change, how to cause the change in the most efficient and painless manner, and how to time and cause the change to happen. From this process the organization will know what is important, what is a strength, what has value, and what does not. It will know when an approach has been useful and when to discard it. It will know when a business process contributes to customer success or when to reengineer it away. Its strategic business strategies will deal more with cultural change factors than traditional operational and financial factors. This process will allow the organization to be the best practices industry benchmark. The organization transforms itself from supervision to creative leadership, and will learn to develop a reliance on and trust in those in the cross-functional lateral and functional daily management positions since they have the fundamental understanding of the business. Creative leadership will focus on the panoramic future of the organization and lead by macromanagement, not by the traBurton, Terrence T. is the author of 'Future-Focused Organization Complete Organizational Alignment for Breakthrough Success' with ISBN 9780133237917 and ISBN 0133237915.