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Align Your Incentives to Focus on Profit
by Hermann Simon Frank F. Bilstein Frank LubyA common corporate shortcut is to reward salespeople primarily on how much they sell or how much revenue they bring in. This shortcut often encourages behavior that can destroy your profits or undermine your efforts to increase them. It trains salespeople to ask their superiors for lower prices instead of negotiating with customers for higher ones. To retrieve the higher profits they deserve, companies need to make the transition from volume-based sales incentive systems to profit-based ones. This applies to your own sales representatives and to your channel partners, who act as your agents to the end customer.
Align the Practical Realities: Generation Y--Shaping Your Personal Career Strategy
by Tamara EricksonDuring your job search, you will have to home in on the practical realities of your specific situation. How much money do you need to make? How much time can you devote to work? What level of responsibility do you want? If they don't align with your biggest dreams, you may need to prioritize your wants and needs and decide which concessions to make as you start you career. In this chapter, the author offers a framework for organizing your thoughts on these realities, along with two stories of Gen Y's who are in the midst of wrestling with these trade-offs.
Align: Get Your Team on the Same Page, Discover Clients' Needs, Develop Better Products
by Laura Marie ReeseUnderstanding what customers want is neither easy nor obvious — but it is essential for all companies. In this guide, expert Laura Reese walks you through the pitfalls and possibilities of customer interactions. Focusing on business-to-business fields, she demonstrates how to run face-to-face meetings that solicit valuable feedback and shares simple techniques for unlocking meaningful insights into a client's needs.You will learn how to cultivate an aligning mind-set within your company and among your own team by defining clear roles for each member. In addition to step-by-step guides for running customer alignment meetings, the book outlines specific skills for improving engagement with customers. Based on concepts of proven effectiveness, these tools will help transform a disparate group into a unified team of professionals working toward the same goal of discovering valuable customer insights."In the world of product development, be it semiconductors or anything else for that matter, big bets are placed on building the product the customer really needs. At Altera, Laura Reese energetically engaged on a mission to master the art of understanding what the customer really truly wants, digging through the layers of what to get to the far more valuable understanding of why. In this journey she developed a strategy for customer engagement to overcome the challenges of confirmation bias and other aspects of human nature-driven obstacles to the truth. In doing so, she created intellectual honesty in Altera's understanding of customers' needs, leading to some of the best products Altera has ever produced. The techniques she describes are applicable to any kind of uncovering exercise required to achieve an understanding of what is really required. I am delighted that she has been able to share her insights through this book." — Richard Cliff, CTO, Altera Corporation
Aligned Influence: Beyond Governance
by Ken SchuetzFor board members and executives, a clear path to organizational improvement.Within every organization is an “ecosystem” of influencers. In organizations with boards of directors and executives, that ecosystem is even more complex, and it is even more important to understand it for the benefit of everyone, including investors and donors.To date, governance models have provided little to no understanding of this ecosystem of influence, leaving this as an ongoing problem in organizations with the complexity of a board and executive. Governance experts have applied a number of inadequate solutions to a problem they still do not grasp. In Aligned Influence®, Ken Schuetz presents the Aligned Influence® model, which offers a unique perspective on this central problem—and a solution that addresses organizational alignment as a necessary prerequisite to effectiveness.
Aligned Thinking: Make Every Moment Count
by James SteffenToo much to do! I never get anything done! I have so little control over my life! These were thoughts Ray had as he headed home later for supper, confident his wife, Carol, would be sympathetic to his problem. One sentence into unloading his problems on her, he heard, "Too much to do? Tell me about it!" Her problems were as big as or even bigger than his. When they went to a friend for help, they discovered more than hope, "That sounds like us several years ago. But Coach Eric's Aligned Thinking not only solved those problems, it helped us to do what most people believe impossible: align every action to what we really want. With mild hope and huge skepticism, Ray and Carol visited Coach Eric and gave him a description of their ideal professional and personal life. Coach Eric assured them that Aligned Thinking could help them enjoy each item on their list. However, when he asked them to add to their list "make every moment count so life becomes a celebration," Ray and Carol became even more skeptical. Join Ray and Carol as they discover the proven power of Aligned Thinking.
Aligned Thinking: Make Every Moment Count
by Ken Blanchard Jim SteffenModern life is filled with frustrations -- too much work, too many interruptions, not enough personal time, and an increasing sense of losing control and meaning.The key lies in three questions: "How do I get the most from the only thing I control -- my actions now?"; "With the many options I have, how do I stay focused on what I really want?"; and "What do I really want from life and work?" Written in the style of a simple fable, the book invites readers to join Ray and Carol Walters as they learn to apply the techniques of Aligned Thinking to their own lives. Together, they discover how to understand their priorities and develop practical ways to focus on what's important. Equally good for at work or at home, Aligned Thinking helps partners communicate and grow closer, allowing them to reduce stress and increase productivity, motivation, morale, and, most important, satisfaction.
Aligned to Achieve: How to Unite Your Sales and Marketing Teams into a Single Force for Growth
by Tracy Eiler Andrea AustinA smart, practical guide to rocket-powered business growth Aligned to Achieve puts sales and marketing on the same page, creating a revenue 'dream team' that will drive your organization to new heights. Smart, practical explanations, case studies, and tips guide you toward action over theory, and dozens of examples illustrate the tangible effects of these changes in action at business-to-business companies. Written by sales and marketing executives who have made alignment work, this book is directed toward practitioners and leaders seeking to crack the code of sales and marketing alignment. Contributions by industry thought leaders and B2B executives provide fresh perspective and nuanced direction, while thoughtful, strategic, and well-supported guidance throughout helps you remove the obstacles standing in the way of your organization's financial and strategic goals. Misalignment between sales and marketing is an age-old problem—frequently lamented, but seldom addressed. As this schism grows amidst the evolving marketplace, its effects on top and bottom line performance are being felt more than ever before. This book shows you how to bring sales and marketing together effectively once and for all, leveraging their strengths to build an unstoppable force for growth. Understand the cost of misalignment and the driving forces behind it Learn strategies for improving your culture, process, leadership, and technology to initiate and support alignment Identify the best places to modify your sales and marketing programs to kickstart collaboration and cooperation between your teams Discover how other companies are uniting their sales and marketing teams into a single force for growth Walk away with practical advice on how to apply recommendation in the real world Misalignment is frustrating for everyone in sales, marketing, and leadership. It's also detrimental to your organization's performance—but the problem is not insurmountable. In fact, most of the obstacles it creates are self-inflicted, and entirely within control of leadership. Aligned to Achieve helps you identify and remove those obstacles, and build a culture of sustainable growth.
Aligned: Stakeholder Management for Product Leaders
by Bruce McCarthy Melissa AppelProduct management naturally incorporates empathy, psychology, and thinking outside the box in pursuit of the best design for products. But how often do you apply those same skills to your relationships with people in your company?By breaking the art of stakeholder management into simple lessons and frameworks, this practical book shows product managers how to manage the crucial relationships that will help you make an impact and advance your career. You'll learn how to build trusting relationships with stakeholders, optimize your communication for different audiences, get buy-in for your ideas and roadmaps, and have stakeholders appreciate it when you say no.You'll learn how to:Build and maintain trust with your stakeholdersMap your organization and identify the real power playersEstablish roles and build an extended team that works well togetherCommunicate in a way that speaks to the needs and goals of different stakeholdersGet buy-in on your ideas and roadmapMake stakeholders appreciate and support you when you say "no"Sustain buy-in over timeManage difficult stakeholders and personalities
Aligning Boards and Investors
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonWith the increased emphasis on corporate governance, executives are now creating additional corporate value by using the Balanced Scorecard to enhance governance processes and to improve communication with shareholders. This chapter examines a three-part Balanced Scorecard-based governance system that offers directors streamlined and strategic information for making decisions about the company's future directions and its reporting and disclosure policies.
Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory And Practice (Advances In Analytics And Data Science Ser. #1)
by Murugan Anandarajan Teresa D. HarrisonThis book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization’s decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap.Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapters 2 - 5 examines how the use of cognitive computing improves financial advice, how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry, explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and provides the context for analytics in practice. Chapters 6 - 9 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges, explores the application of agile methodologies, discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, and a case study on human capital analytics. Chapters 10 - 11 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall and highlights how new media marketing and analytics fostered new insights. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.
Aligning External Partners
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonThe final component in an organization alignment program is for the enterprise to build scorecards with strategic external partners, such as key suppliers, customers, and alliances. This chapter looks at the process of reaching consensus about the objectives for relationships with external partners, creating understanding and trust across organizational boundaries, reducing transaction costs, and minimizing misalignment between the two parties.
Aligning Financial and Customer Strategies
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonEnterprises can create organizational synergies in many ways. Using case studies from companies like Hilton Hotels and Citizen Schools, this chapter describes how private-sector companies, public-sector agencies, and nonprofit organizations have created enterprise-derived value through specific attention to financial and customer synergies.
Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy
by Linda HolbecheWhat difference can the aspiring HR strategist really make to business value? In the new and extensively updated edition of her ground-breaking book, Linda Holbeche answers this question and provides the tools and insights to help HR managers and directors add value to the organization by implementing effective HR initiatives that are aligned to core business strategies. This edition includes new chapters, fresh case questions, specific sector ‘twists’ like healthcare, the university sector, travel and tourism, alongside a greater mix of international case studies. Taking a more analytical approach than previous works, Holbeche discusses and explores a number of contemporary academic debates. Learn how you can strengthen and prove the relationship between people strategy and business success through your approach to performance and development and impress at the highest levels with this new edition of an HR classic.
Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy
by Linda HolbecheWhat difference can the aspiring HR strategist really make to business value?In the new edition of her ground-breaking book, Linda Holbeche answers this question and provides the tools and insights to help HR managers and directors add value to the organization by implementing effective HR initiatives that are aligned to core business strategies. Featuring updated profiles and case studies from top HR strategists who have used their skills to deliver a variety of key business objectives, Aligning Human Resources and Business Strategy, 2nd edition provides inspiration and guidance on how to apply the theory to challenges in your organization.Learn how you can strengthen and prove the relationship between people strategy and business success through your approach to performance and development and impress at the highest levels with this new edition of an HR classic.Linda Holbeche is Director of Research and Policy at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD). Linda chairs and speaks at meetings and conferences worldwide and appeared at number six in Human Resources magazine's HR most influential 2008 roll call of top industry thinkers.
Aligning Incentives for Supply Chain Efficiency
by Ananth Raman V. G. NarayananIntroduces students to the basics of principal-agency theory as it applies to supply chains. Operational problems in supply chains can often be traced to incentive issues. Students and managers lack frameworks to analyze incentive problems in supply chains. This note offers such a framework.
Aligning Intangible Assets to Enterprise Strategy
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonThe learning and growth perspective of the Balanced Scorecard highlights the role for aligning the organization's intangible assets to its strategy. The three components of intangible assets (human capital, information capital, and organization capital) must be aligned with the objectives for internal processes and integrated with each other. This chapter describes how the strategy map and Balanced Scorecard enable organizations to describe intangible assets, align and integrate intangible assets to strategy, and measure intangible assets and their alignment.
Aligning Internal Process and Learning and Growth Strategies: Integrated Strategic Themes
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonAn enterprise can achieve significant economies of scale when it centralizes key processes--such as production, distribution, purchasing, human resource management, or risk management--to serve its diverse business units. This chapter explores the opportunities organizations can exploit by aligning their internal business processes and their intangible assets to achieve enterprise-level synergies. Four types of enterprise value propositions, including shared processes and services, and corporate-level strategic themes, are discussed.
Aligning Lean and Value-based Management: Operations and Financial Functions at the System Level (Contributions to Management Science)
by Gerd KaufmannThis book explores the relationship between and the compatibility of lean management (LM) and value-based management (VBM) approaches at the systems level. It then develops a model to improve LM and VBM professional practice by fostering a shared understanding of the value creation process within a lean system, and in doing so helps to remove existing barriers. The results promote future fruitful alliances between a company's operational and financial communities, enhancing the benefits to the enterprise and its stakeholders. The book is of primary interest to LM and VBM professionals and researchers.
Aligning Mission and Margin at Southern Bancorp
by Eren Kuzucu Rebecca M. Henderson Brian TrelstadIn October 2020, after spending almost a decade to turnaround Southern Bancorp, an Arkansan bank founded with the mission to provide financial services to rural, underserved communities, CEO Darrin Williams is wondering how Southern Bancorp should continue to grow. Since taking the helm of the bank, Williams has worked with his team to revamp the bank's finances, provide liquidity to its investors, raise new capital, and prove that the bank's operations (dubbed "the margin") reinforced its mission to provide financial services to underserved communities. Williams has several questions to consider in preparing Southern Bancorp's next phase of growth: Should he continue Southern Bancorp's efforts to grow in preparation for a traditional public offering? Or should he take advantage of the increasing public and private capital dedicated to racial equity to deepen the bank's mission and become a central player in the effort to close the racial wealth gap? Would listing Southern Bancorp in public markets disrupt the delicate balance between the mission and the margin? Was Southern Bancorp attractive enough to receive the dedicated capital flooding to close the racial wealth gap?
Aligning Organizational Units and Employees: A Critical Step in the Strategy Execution Process
by Robert S. Kaplan David P. NortonA truly effective management system for aligning business unit strategy with operations must address how strategy is integrated across diverse organizational units, and how to align employees with the strategy. This chapter describes the best practices companies use to align business units, support units, and employees to strategy.
Aligning Organizations Through Measurement: The GQM+Strategies Approach (The Fraunhofer IESE Series on Software and Systems Engineering)
by Martin Kowalczyk Jürgen Münch Victor Basili Adam Trendowicz Jens Heidrich Carolyn Seaman Dieter RombachAligning an organization's goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making. After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method. This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization's goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate their research results into organizational environments.
Aligning Perspectives in Gender Mainstreaming: Gender, Health, Safety, and Wellbeing (Aligning Perspectives on Health, Safety and Well-Being)
by Juliet Hassard Luis D. TorresThis book brings together various threads of research in the field of gender mainstreaming. It aids in further supporting and understanding the role of gender in health and safety research, practice, and policy. It looks at gender mainstreaming as being recognised as key in cultivating sustainable worker health and working systems due to it being a central component of many international policy initiatives. This book deals with gender mainstreaming being advocated at a policy level, while focusing on the limited recognition and discourse on the issue of gender and its direct and indirect association to workers’ health in the field of occupational health and safety. This book addresses problems facing gender-sensitive policies and outlines and reflects upon current best practice principles and practices to support the development and implementation of policies, interventions, and research initiatives.
Aligning Span of Attention: The Goal of Organization Design
by Robert L. SimonsThis chapter presents a framework for organization design, focusing on the four key elements that organizations must address in order to ensure the successful execution of strategy: customer definition, critical performance variables, creative tension, and commitment to others.
Aligning Strategy and Sales
by Frank V. Cespedes"The best sales book of the year" - strategy+business magazineThat gap between your company's sales efforts and strategy? It's real-and a huge vulnerability. Addressing that gap, actionably and with attention to relevant research, is the focus of this book.In Aligning Strategy and Sales, Harvard Business School professor Frank Cespedes equips you to link your go-to-market initiatives with strategic goals. Cespedes offers a road map to articulate strategy in ways that people in the field can understand and that will fuel the behaviors required for profitable growth. Without that alignment, leaders will press for better execution when they need a better strategy, or change strategic direction with great cost and turmoil when they should focus on the basics of sales execution.With thoughtful, clear, and engaging examples, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides a framework for diagnosing and managing the core levers available for effective selling in any organization. It will give you the know-how and tools to move from ideas to action and build a sales effort linked to your firm's unique goals, not a generic selling formula.Cespedes shows how sales efforts affect all elements of value creation in a business, whether you're a start-up seeking to scale or an established firm looking to jump-start new growth. The book provides key insights to optimize your firm's customer management activities and so improve selling and strategy.
Aligning Strategy and Sales: The Choices, System, and Behaviors That Drive Effective Selling
by Frank V. CespedesIt's time to address the enormous cost of the strategy-sales gap. The most crucial connection in an organization seeking to grow is between sales and strategy. But if your company is like most, instead of a strong connection there is a widening gap and too little bang for the buck. This book will help turn the tide for your organization. US companies, for example, invest almost $900 billion annually in their sales forces-more than three times the amount they spend on all media advertising, and twenty times more than the total spent on digital marketing. Yet research indicates that, on average, companies deliver only about 50 to 60 percent of the financial performance their strategies promise. That's a lot of wasted money and managerial effort. Aligning Strategy and Sales will help you close the gap, establish the needed connections, and improve both sales and strategy in your organization. From the author's research, practice, and years of work with firms across many industries, you'll learn how to improve performance by: - Articulating strategy in ways that busy people can understand and embrace, and then translating strategic choices into sales tasks that bring results. - Hiring, compensating, and measuring salespeople and performance in ways that are consistent with strategic goals. - Selecting and developing people who can manage as well as sell, and finding practical ways to improve the coordination between sales and other functions required for profitable growth. Usable, thoughtful, and clear, this book will help you drive performance, evaluate sales numbers, and hire or train the people who deal with your customers-from sales and functional heads to HR and the C-suite. Informed by the author's experience and research as a business manager, board member, consultant, and professor at Harvard Business School, Aligning Strategy and Sales provides the know-how and tools to do exactly what its title promises.