Another year is coming to its end, and it's time look back at what we have achieved. It's also time to set objectives and plan actions for next year.How was your year? Did you meet your objectives? Did you stay focused? Did you manage to keep your work and life balanced?
How about next year? How are your objectives? Are they focused? Will you be able to keep yourself and your relationships healthy?
I received the seasons greetings below from Gemba Consulting. It is spot on.
I wish you all happy holidays and a successful new year!
Samuli
How many things are on your agenda for 2010? Whether you are the CEO of a major company or the leader of your own life this is a question we all must ask ourselves as we prepare to meet the coming year. When teaching the TPS approach to strategic planning and deployment known as hoshin kanri there are several critical conversations we must have.
The first and most important is to limit the annual objectives to only the vital few, three to five at most. This is incredibly difficult for most to do since we all want and need to do so much. Yet to be as effective as possible we must focus most of management team's effort on the vital few breakthrough objectives.
What happens to everything else we need or want to do? We must deselect these other initiatives, integrate or turn them into enablers for the breakthrough objectives, or handle them through daily management. The capability of senior leaders to delegate to junior leaders much of the daily management and problem solving that occupies them can be a breakthrough objective in itself.
I wish all of you improved health, success and well being in 2010!
Jon Miller
CEO
Gemba Consulting
2 comments:
Hi Samuli,
You have found an excellent letter of the consulting company. Though it is always valid, now we are experiencing fundamental changes in many businesses and worldwide.
Organizational/business structures are changing and becoming thinner and cleaner than ever before. One of our biggest problem is that we haven't found places for all the inputs we had at the beginning - before things started to move into new directions. So, we have still long way to go in balancing our resource productivity tasks - again worldwide.
We have a similar kind of situation ongoing in many companies in my home country. Families, entrepreneurs (small and big) are desperately thinking of what to do. Should they divest, should they expand/merge or should they focus on something what they consider knowing the best/well? From the psychological point of view, focus is not an easy strategic choice for an entrepreneur - especially without a plan B - or C.
My proposal for a "rescue plan":
- creativity should be immediately introduced and practiced more in our education systems
- creativity and innovation workshops/concepts should be introduced again to all organizational levels (not only to middle and top management level)-->it had earlied a bigger role in my home country also within blue collar workers-->I have witnessed some of them changing the whole factory layouts and production methods of multinational companies
- capital markets should be more easily available for the SME companies as well (not the case in my home country)
- even though I am a supporter of the free market economy, I consider that also "state"/state supported organizations should have a bigger role right now in co-ordinating innovation work between the schools, universities, companies as as well as with nowadays almost non existing local incubators/clusters, who have been trying to "invent a new chair" there for already couple of decades -without much impact on developments.
Daddy
...to my previous message - I meant LEANER (though cleaner as well) ;) businesses/organizations.
Daddy
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