Democratizing Ideas

Organizations are as slow, hierarchical, and political as ever. Worse still, organizations are only tapping into a fraction of the potential of their teams, who are now transcending five generations of workers, from Traditionalist to Generation Y, and yes AI, each of which have completely different working styles, expectations, and motivations. Marc Gilenson

Current State

Enterprises worldwide have a strategic imperative to innovate, but the challenges remain the same…innovate while limiting business disruption. The solution often requires finding innovative yet practical ways to handle potentially extensive costs, workplace politics, department silos, lack of visibility into interconnectedness, sub-optimized goals and objectives, lack of training, and sporadic executive support. These innovative and practical solutions are often stopped in their tracks by legacy systems, corporate culture, a lack of collaboration, and a lack of data and intelligence.

Organizations are as slow, hierarchical, and political as ever. Worse still, organizations are only tapping into a fraction of the potential of their teams, who are now transcending five generations of workers, from Traditionalist to Generation Y, each of which have completely different working styles, expectations, and motivations.

The way in which change is happening at large scale enterprise is still entrenched with the same issues and facilitation techniques that have existed for decades.

Despite the massive transformation that digital technology has brought to our world, leadership and culture remain stuck in the industrial era. The advent of programing techniques like Agile and others, have done little to change the way corporations create, implement and benefit from innovation and process improvements. As organizations we are as slow, hierarchical, and political as ever.

To make matters worse, the majority of employees, your biggest asset and biggest investment,?are not engaged. They are brought into nod heads and agree as they are numbed by PowerPoint and managers that only care about their “sub-optimized” goals and objectives. Employees that have not been emotionally or financially beaten into submission do their best to give input,?but soon the status-quo voices dominate that feed on “Fingerpointerosis,” “Competitive Obsession,” and a zero-sum gain culture where everyone loses.

Employees find ways to “level-set” their work to the lowest benchmark possible allowing the mediocre to survive and many times get promoted. Innovation dies, inspiration is muted, process improvements stay hidden, risks are not brought up, the “ME” culture never becomes the “WE” culture.

There Is a Solution

A profound shift is taking place in the way business transformation is happening. Executives are beginning to understand the value of implementing a Mutual Benefit Culture. Corporate Entrepreneurial Leaders are beginning to engage with employees from every level. These leaders know that buy-in from employees at every level is critical to effectively transforming an organization. Executing and delivering on the company’s strategy requires interconnectedness through team alignment and support.

Tapping into the corporate wisdom of the workforce in a meaningful way is essential in establishing both inclusivity and input, ensuring a significant impact is achieved by implementing a new technology or process improvement.

Corporations are seeking out the best practices of companies that went from startup to worldwide enterprises. They are looking for ways to turn their ship faster and more efficiently. They are looking to turn their employees into Corporate Entrepreneurial Leaders.

The Thought Leadership Pod, built on the S.M.A.R.T. framework and wrapped in a mutual benefit philosophy, is the driver behind the accomplishments of many successful companies. It guides what we build and how we build it. It forms the set of shared values we have with our employees, management teams and partners. The following ideas represent the principles that make up the Thought Leadership Pod and directly impact what we strive to achieve.

Democratizing Ideas

All ideas are created equal. Like concepts, they should be judged on their content, not the characteristics of the envelope or delivery person.

People make better decisions when they judge ideas based on their merits. We help teams’ separate ideas from egos, create a deep and common understanding, and build lasting solutions on a platform of honesty and openness.

Mightiness

The best outcomes arise when people participate without fear and listen without prejudice. Many people instinctively censor themselves, filtering those contributions which might challenge convention or power, go against the majority, or seem insignificant. As a result, most decisions in organizations are based on incomplete, inaccurate, or politically biased information.

The Thought Leadership Pod will provide your company with solutions that encourage self-actualization so that leaders may learn what their stakeholders really think, and participants experience the rewards of meaningful engagement.

Mutual Benefit

The most inclusive culture wins. Engaging all stakeholders in an open process enhances outcomes and leads to better execution. In the past, cost, time zones, and logistics kept leaders from including significant numbers of people in a process.

Technology when combined with the S.M.A.R.T. framework enables the efficient, cost-effective engagement of large numbers of people. Using Thought Leadership Pods, leaders engage broad stakeholders deeply in the challenges of the organization resulting in enhanced innovation, execution, and loyalty.

Wakefulness

Every person should have the opportunity to contribute their highest value every day. Our lives are precious, and our minds are full of potential. At any given moment, the odds are that the breakthrough idea is in the room, not at the front of it.

For a team to be paid to sit through slides or calls for more than a few minutes without contributing their thoughts, is the definition of insanity – a tragic waste of minds, time, and opportunity.

Thought Leadership Pods deliver solutions that respect and maximize the value of people’s time and ideas.

For Every Exceptional Outcome, There Is an Exceptional Best Practice

Teams collaborating on an outcome, produce consistently better, faster, and more efficient results when they follow a best practice. The best collaborative processes promote shared understanding, innovation, and alignment amongst stakeholders.

Thought Leadership Pods enable leaders to use collaborative templates like building blocks to bring structure quickly and easily to the chaos of teamwork. Your community of thought-leaders, clients, partners, and staff are building and monetizing the repository of best practice business methods. We will show you how to tap into this Corporate Wisdom that is within your reach.

Together your people strive to make an impact!

The outcome is that managers become Corporate Entrepreneurial Leaders as they look to differentiate their workplace and achieve extraordinary results from their teams… helping them go from frustration to inspiration.

Time to benefit from our Interconnected society

It is time?for a new deal. For everyone’s sake, let’s unleash the power of the Thought Leadership Pod to create a new era of work. An era where we include all voices… remove the politics… share what we know… expose the risks…change the game… inspire action…free each person to contribute their absolute best, and then discover the amazing outcome together, because there is no better feeling than truly being part of something. This is what it’s?like to be engaged… to revel in our interconnectedness.

The Thought Leadership Pod uses the Interconnectedness that technology brings into our digital ages. It allows you to create a culture of mutual benefit, openness, and transform your ability to execute strategic initiatives.

Interconnectedness is a quality demonstrated by any group of people working together. Groups can act more or less connected depending on their understanding of what they do, and how it affects the whole. The more understanding of their interconnectedness, the more their structure, processes, and interactions lead to exceptional outcomes.

Implement a Mutual Guarantee

Mutual Guarantee is a concept embraced by many of the world’s largest corporations to create a company that can make a profit and has long term sustainability. Companies such as Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, Canon, IBM, GOOGLE are just a few of the companies that have been using this concept in one form or another to capture market share, attract the best employees and create value for their brand. It is not just large corporations that have implemented a philosophy of mutual benefit; entrepreneurs all over the country are using this concept to achieve success during tough economic times. Thought Leadership Pods reinforce this concept by incorporating the S.M.A.R.T. framework as the foundation for all ideas and process improvements.

Six attributes of Mutual Benefit:

1. Activities must be beneficial for both parties – if our actions will cause someone else in our organization to be worse off, then we should not do it.
2. We should not make money at the expense of our customers – this is short term thinking that has ruined many companies. Our customers must remain strong and profitable for us to continue making profit from our business with them.
3. Look for the lifetime value of an action – do not only think of the immediate gain from your action. You must look at the big picture and consider the lifetime value of the actions you take.
4. Don’t look down on others – you may think that certain departments or individuals are not as smart or as good as you are, or you may think they are not doing their job as well as they should, therefore, you will treat them with disrespect and judgment. This is a great mistake, we should all try to understand why people are acting as they do and remember we can all learn from each other, no matter what job or situation they are currently in.
5. It behooves us to help others achieve their goals – don’t just try to reach your goals at the expense of others within the company. You will eventually realize how interdependent we all are and the chasm you created may be too great to cross.
6. No conflict is insurmountable unless it is based on greed or ego – there is always a win/win solution to any conflict if it is not based on greed or ego. If a conflict is based on greed or ego, then only a higher authority can solve the conflict. This will usually lead to continued conflict unless the participants with the greed or ego issue is removed from the situation.

Enterprise business leaders find it difficult to engage all stakeholders and capture the best ideas. Moreover, it is hard to get buy-in and drive organizational change using traditional communication methods that inhibit open and active participation.

The Thought Leadership Pod is purpose-built?to address these challenges. Our S.M.A.R.T. Platform enables corporate entrepreneurial leaders to quickly capture hundreds of ideas, drive rapid team alignment, and consistently achieve extraordinary results.

The development of mightiness amongst your employees, the understanding of how they are connected to the whole system that is your company, and the adaptation of a mutual benefit philosophy will allow your company to Realize Extraordinary Results from Your Teams!

Optimizing Business Processes

Explore the many ways that ECG’s Thought Leadership Pod can span multiple business functions, and merge collaboration with industry-specific business processes.

Strategy & Operations

• Strategic Planning
• Innovation
• Process Improvement
• Change Management
• Leadership
• Culture

Project Management

• Technology Project Management
• Project Scope Development
• SWOT Analysis Validation
• Event Management
• Human Factors Inclusion
• Requirements Development
• User acceptance

Sales

• New Business Development
• Account Planning
• Tactics & Technique evaluation
• Best Practices
• Use of available tools

Conclusion

INSANITY…DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER, WHILE EXPECTING A DIFFERENT RESULT!

Based upon two decades of research and analysis of how corporations and entrepreneurial enterprises succeed, ECG developed the Thought Leadership Pod and built it on the S.M.A.R.T. platform. We then wrapped the whole concept in a mutual benefit philosophy to achieve amazing results with documented ROI’S.

A Thought Leadership Pod that is built on the S.M.A.R.T. framework has proven to help companies meet those ever-growing challenges by enabling leaders and teams to successfully meet their mission critical initiatives.

Whether projects are routine or mission critical and/or cross organizational (Enterprise Technology Roll-out, Change Management, Business Process Re-engineering, Strategy Synthesis, Organizational Design & Alignment, Customer Advisory Board Engagement, Enterprise Risk Management, Sales Processes and Training, etc.), the Thought Leadership Pod delivers.