People Power         

"In the end, all management can be reduced to three words: people, product, and profits. People come first." 

– Lee Iacocca

People as Your Most Important Asset

People as your most important asset. Your technologies, products and structures can be copied by competitors. No one, however, can match your highly charged, motivated people who care.

People are your firm's repository of knowledge and they are central to your company's competitive advantage. Well educated, coached, and highly motivated people are critical to the development and execution of strategies, especially in today's faster-paced, more perplexing world, where top management alone can no longer assure your firm's competitiveness.

12 Breakthrough Management Ideas for the New Economy

Source: Harvard Economic Review Executive summary by Anastasia Bibikova.

The best ideas related to the practice of management. If you know somebody has used them, don’t try to repeat. Simply consider them, debate them and let them inspire your own thinking!...

9. Social Networks (SN) and Modern Companies: SN – is a major capital of the company. They may help to leverage real people’s interactions for everything from trend spotting by scouring public conversations to identifying internal experts within a department to ensuring that a manager actually results in cooperation among employees... More

12 Effective Leadership Roles

• Empower people; delegate authority; be open to ideas; have faith in the creativity of others... More

The people say, 'We did it ourselves.'... More

 Case Study  GE Work-Out

Jack Welch has always said that GE's primary product and core competence is not jet engines or gas turbines, but people. One of the most fundamental truths about Welch's management principles is that it's about people, not numbers. "We are constantly amazed by how much people will do when they are not told what to do by management," says Welch.

In most organizations, change efforts come and go - and rarely make a difference. But at GE, one of the largest companies in the world, one particular change process helped spark a complete transformation – Work-Out. With Work-Out as part of its DNA, GE has become one of the most innovative, profitable, and admired companies on earth.³

At its core, Work-Out is a very simple concept based on the premise that those closest to the work know it best. When the ideas of those people, irrespective of their functions and job titles, are solicited and turned immediately into action, an unstoppable wave of creativity, energy, and productivity is unleashed throughout the organization. At GE, Work-Out "Town Meetings" gave the corporation access to an unlimited resource of imagination and energy of its talented employees.

How To Lead Creative People

By: Max DePree

• Innovation is the lifeblood of an organization. Knowing how to lead and work with creative people requires knowledge and action that often goes against the typical organizational structure. Protect unusual people from bureaucracy and legalism typical of organizations... More

Eliminating Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy makes work and creates climate in which the customer comes third – well after the management and the company's other employees.

How much of your energy is expended on purely internal activities? if you spend less than 20% of your energy on external customers, than bureaucracy has taken hold... More

Developing  Entrepreneurial Staff

There are two phases in developing an entrepreneurial workplace. Phase I creates the environment necessary to support and encourage it. Phase II is building your staff's entrepreneurial skills... More

Process Approach To Mobilizing Everyone's Abilities

The process approach rejects the idea that the company's success relies on luck, such as inspired individuals or visionary leaders, on the grounds that it is unsustainable. Your cannot control whether "lightning will strike, or depend on it to strike regularly. Process companies seek to institutionalize success by designing high-performance ways of working. They do not denigrate the talents of remarkable individuals, but they recognize that all human talent can and should be leveraged by an overall process. They believe that a company achieves its highest potential by designing processes that mobilize everyone's abilities rather than depending too much on any single individual, however gifted she or he may be."⁵... More