Smart Work makes the argument that organizational transformational is needed now. When the urgent drives out the important, organizations are trapped in the status quo. When employees are frantically busy with email madness and dysfunctional meetings, there’s no time to think. Without reflection, there’s no way to create a smart future for the organization.
New York Time best-selling author, Steven Stanton describes how organizations become prisoners of their bad habits and how Continuous Improvement programs only provide expensive “better sameness” and unintentionally constrain big change.
Smart Work describes a dramatically new organizational model, based on new technologies, which will provide organizations with unprecedented levels of self-awareness and sentience – the ability to sense, understand, and respond to marketplace information.
Readers of Smart Work will learn:
- To recognize the symptoms of Project-itis and how to defeat it
- What digitized processes are, and the role they play in performance improvement
- How to identify key metrics and develop a balanced measurement scorecard
- How to proactively sense deep customer and competitor actions and to avoid surprises
- When to power-up governing processes to achieve higher levels of organizational synergy
Smart Work presents both a clear and compelling argument for why BIG change is needed, and a roadmap for successful execution.
Unfortunately, traditional organizations have developed formidable defenses against the very changes they need for survival. For all their assets, large organizations are weaker than the sum of their parts because their basic design is explicitly intended to limit change and innovation.
Table of Content
Prologue: Observations of an Industrial Tourist Overview Table of Contents WHAT GETS IN THE WAY? 1. Too Busy to Think • Endless Email • Meeting Madness • Project-itis • Why is everyone so busy? • When You’re 2BZ2 Think • It’s a Terrible Time to be Dumb • Punctuated Equilibrium 2. Seven Deadly Dysfunctions • Urgency • More! • Superficiality • Obliviousness • Narcissism: Let’s Talk about Me • Now: Immediate Gratification • Localism THE SHAPE OF THE SOLUTION 3. Becoming a Smart Organization: From Victim to Victor • Data, Data Everywhere • You Can’t get There from Here • Flying from Line of Sight to Instrumentation • Data Alchemy • From Averages to Actuals • Hansei, or the Art of Reflection GETTING SMARTER 4. Smart Metrics: From Guessing to Knowing • Measurement is Tough • Ways We Get Measurement Wrong • Smart Measurement • Understanding the True Purposes of Measurement • Identifying the Right Metrics • Setting Performance Targets • Developing an Effective Measurement Cycle • Evolving Measurement 5. Smart Sensing • Fast Fashion • Focusing Outside • Customer Questions • Competitor Questions • Looking through the Johari Window • Sensing Story • The Lost-Customer Audit • Throw Your Executives Out into the Marketplace • In the Crow’s Nest: Disruptor Paranoia • Traditional Competitor Sensing: Extreme Version • Market Sensing Tactics for Customer Insight • Market Sensing Tactics for Competitor Insights • Environmental Sensing • The Process of Sensing • The Zen of Sensing 6. The Imperatives of Smart Improvement: From Better Sameness to Transformation • Knock Down Your Silos • Embrace Transformational Change • Do Fewer but Better Projects • Digitize your Processes • Make Data-Driven Decisions 7. Smarter Workers: From Taylor to Tomorrow • Inspire Them with a Powerful Purpose • Turn them into Professionals by Making their Jobs Bigger • Involve Everyone in Change • Educate them about the Business • Liberate Everyone from Outmoded Policies • Freedom and Time to Think • Smarter Meetings • Smarter Email 8. Smart Behaviors: From Words to Actions • Completely Customer-Centric • Ambitious yet Humble • Doubly Accountable • Decisive and Data Driven • Collaborative Together • Intellectually Curious • Final Exam 9. Smart Enterprise: From Feudalism to Federalism • The Futility of Feudalism • Federalism is Needed • From Conglomerate to Federalist • Governing Processes • Strategic Planning and the Three Great Tensions • Who do You Serve? • Strategic Principles • Today vs. Tomorrow • Improving the Project Portfolio 10. Smart You Acknowledgments
About the author
Steven Stanton is the author of ‘Smart Work: Why Organizations Full of Intelligent People Do So Many Dumb Things and What You Can Do About It.’He is a pioneer of process innovation. For thirty years his work has been focused on improving the capability of organizations to transform themselves.
Through his consulting, writing, and teaching, Mr. Stanton has participated in the development of many of the most innovative and valuable business ideas of the past ten years such as Business Reengineering, Process Management, and Smart Work, a revolutionary way of creating value.
Mr. Stanton is the co-author, with Dr. Hammer, of the ‘Reengineering Revolution’ (Harper Business) and the Harvard Business Review article ‘How Process Organizations Really Work.’ In addition, he has published many articles on business transformation and as a leading management thinker is frequently cited by national publications such as Fortune, Business Week and CFO Magazine.
He teaches many of FCB Partners’ public courses, in many internal training programs, and at Tecnologico Monterrey, in Mexico.
Mr. Stanton holds an MBA from Harvard and a BA from the Berklee School of Music.
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