Commit yourself to never-ending education and training Decide what you are now and what you want your value-add to be Devise a self investment strategy that balances expertise with flexibility Become an expert, totally focused Become a generalist, staying flexible Develop yourself as an economic resource; choose a mix of hard and soft skills Develop …
Hammer and Champy in Reengineering Management also proposed that management, specifically functional middle management, fundamentally changes. They meant dramatic, breakthrough change, not an evolutionary or incremental change. Hammer and Champy believe that today’s Brand U managers, will require three skills, which don’t have much to do with traditional management. Managers will evolve into process owners, …
Michael Porter, a Harvard Business School professor, coined the term ‘value chain’ in the 1980’s. The concept and term took off. The value chain is one of the must-know business concepts for all Brand U’s. Every organization performs a sequence of activities to produce a product or offer a service. These activities add value to …
Brand U companies, even global corporations, have discovered they can’t be all things to all people. The problem started when companies tried to please different customers with a large variety of products, problems arose. Resources were spread too thin so a company could only do certain things moderately well. The wise decision was to focus …
If we have had a formula for growth it has been; start with the best; learn from the best, expand slowly and solidify our position; then horizontally diversify our expertise. Mark McCormick, business person
The real issue is value, not price. Robert Lindgren, Business person FISH: First in. Still Here. Anonymous In the future, more people will work for themselves, creating a huge market for bizarre products. Scott Adams, ‘Dilbert’ creator
The cult of disposability during the reengineering craze changed the work landscape for good. Loyalty is sometimes hard to find. Here’s the rub. Knowledge management needs cooperative workers to share their knowledge. The question for the Brand U organization: ‘Is how do we gather, organize, refine, and commercialize our knowledge?’ The personal Brand U question …
More managers want to get their arms around what a company does extremely well, its core competencies. Once the company has done this, it wants Brand U’s to embrace and enhance these competencies. The thinking goes something like this. We all have valuable data, information, and knowledge. If a team does a critical job and …
An important role of middle management and first level supervision was to organize people and control activities. Do this that way by this time. But, Brand U self managed teams and individuals more often are responsible for these activities. So what does Brand U management do now? They manage relationships between processes, projects, and teams …
Technology is running ahead of our abilities to understand and manage. We’re inundated with new tools. But, what induces us to use the new tools? Last summer, a friend and I were fishing in the mountain lakes of central Oregon. The biggest city, Bend was 40 miles away. Beep … beep … beep from his …