Resources for business

The RapidBI Team have been busy writing new free content covering strategic and tactical business theories, tools, thechiques and methods appropriate for people involved in the development of organizations or themselves. below are some of the newer pages.

Key Pages:

Holistic Diagnostic Tools - Find out what using a holistic approach can offer you and your organization Scanning the Business Environment - Why do this - is it just a waste of time or the critical factor? Management Models - 100+ Management Models - a page full of graphical management models, covering organizational growth, leadership, coaching, change management etc. Porters five forces - Michael Porter's five forces is a model used to explore the environment in which a product or company operates. The PESTLE Analysis - The PESTLE analysis - a powerful tool for exploring the external environment of an organzation Force Field Analysis - The Force Field analysis is a valuable tool in any decisionmaking process SWOT analysis - The SWOT analysis - a powerful tool for exploring the strengths of an organzation Personal Development Plans - Need to develop a Personal Development Plan - all you need is here PRIMO-F_- Business_Growth_Model - The PRIMO-F business growth model, a holistic approach Continuing Professional Development or CPD - CPD has been around for some years, now the need for personal responsibility is ever increasing. Write SMART objectives - Description on how to write SMART and SMARTER objectives for individual and business performance Learning Logs - We have had requests for material to complement our PDP and CPD pages... here it is Critical Success Factors - What are Critical Success Factors and how to use them Corporate Social Responsibility CSR - How does Corporate Social Responsibility impact smaller businesses Learning Styles - Want to be a more effective learner? hers is a summary of the main learning style theories and applicationWrite a Mission Statement - How to write a mission statement for your business. more coming soon...Psychometric_Personality_Testing - What psychometric testing is and how to use it Career Anchors - A powerful tool to help individuals understand their career strengths Business Values -how to use values to create an effective organizationChange Management - Understanding the impact of psychology on change

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Mike Morrison is director of RapidBI, an organizational effectiveness consultancy. He has been involved in HR, OD and strategic development for over 20 years. He can be contacted via www.rapidbi.com/

© This article is copyright RapidBI 2006, 2008 – it may be copied providing the authors are credited, and direct links maintained

Strategy and Tools in Business

Strategy and tools in business

Over the years a lot of good and bad stuff has been said about SWOT. Sure it is not the most robust of tools but when used in the way it was originally developed – it is a powerful tool.
Some people have argued that it is time to move on from SWOT to other things – in this piece we explore SOAR an appreciative Inquiry tool.

An interesting article on this topic was published in Ai Practitioner magazine ( http://preview.tinyurl.com/2bvobg ) (it is available here http://preview.tinyurl.com/26wk4v )for those that are not subscribers).

Having read the article, the SOAR approach to my mind makes the same mistake that many using the SWOT analysis do - and that is they miss the context. When the (highly researched) SOFT was changed to SWOT the new authors missed the point which is why the tool is often miss-understood. It was never designed to stand on its own, nor was it ever to be part of the direct action phase - it was a diagnosis and data capture tool.

The authors of this article to my mind make 2 fundamental mistakes:
1) they assume that all applications of SWOT are in the way they describe
2) they appear to ignore weaknesses and threads - apparently believing that their solution will soar (pardon the pun) over any difficulties.
Would the shareholders of Enron be in the position they are now in (extinct) if they had faced up to their threats and weaknesses, rather than focus on what they thought were their strengths?

The article clearly states in its summary
"This article has attempted to address the strategy-to-execution gap. In doing so, we have discussed SOAR, a strengths-based framework that builds on the best points of SWOT (strengths and opportunities) in order to move beyond the “as-is” state of the organization’s environment to the “to-be”."

Yes this as a framework can be used as the authors state to take SWOT data and apply it - but SOAR in itself is not a diagnostic or orientation tool. Anyone using this as a diagnostic tool is going to make the same errors as 1000's of people have done with inappropriate use of SWOT.
This thread has been started to help CIPD students (and others) complete their studies - and for that they must use SWOT and PESTLE - if they chose to use other tools they will need references - I cannot see any on the article .

Appreciative Enquiry has its place.
Appreciative Inquiry is a particular way of asking questions and envisioning the future that fosters positive relationships and builds on the basic goodness in a person, a situation, or an organization. In so doing, it enhances a system's capacity for collaboration and change. Appreciative Inquiry utilizes a 4-stage process focusing on:

• DISCOVER: The identification of organizational processes that work well.
• DREAM: The envisioning of processes that would work well in the future.
• DESIGN: Planning and prioritizing processes that would work well.
• DESTINY (or DELIVER): The implementation (execution) of the proposed design.
  
  

The basic idea is to build organizations around what works, rather than trying to fix what doesn't. It is the opposite of problem solving. AI focuses on how to create more of what's already working.
This method is more positive in nature than many others, however it is as a strategy naive in that it assumes success breeds success - many organizations are in fact where they are now because they did solve problems and did not just focus on what works.

Would a company that currently makes plastic carrier bags be advised to use SOAR - or look at the external factors which may bring about the end of the need for their product?

Equally any diagnostic process needs to look holistically at the people and the processes - not just one or the other.

Is SWOT redundant?.....

No but it is sure made more reliable with additions of other models in the transition to application.

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Mike Morrison is director of RapidBI, an organizational effectiveness consultancy. He has been involved in HR, OD and strategic development for over 20 years. He can be contacted via www.rapidbi.com/

© This article is copyright RapidBI 2008 – it may be copied providing the authors are credited, and direct links maintained

Networking or not working? - The value of social networking

For those of us that use the net during work time, there are two types of networking sites, those that can aid learning, productivity and build business relationships and those that can slow or even stop work in its tracks. In this article, I explore the risks to individuals and businesses in the growing use of personal contact sites.


Personality types
Are you the type of person that enjoys getting post or personal emails. For some of us, personal messages from people they know (or don’t know) causes excitement and fun. The feeling is almost addictive. What am I talking about? Well do you have your MSN or Yahoo messenger running while at work? Ready for people you know to chat to you? Do you feel compelled to talk when someone you know appears online? At best, this is a distraction; at its worst, it can disable some individuals from doing any work at all. But this is not the worst of it. With people we know our feelings and reaction to people we know is more often or not within reasonable control.


Are you ‘addicted’ to instant messaging?
Checking your email once or twice a day is one thing, but being permanently connected is quite another.

How can you tell if you are addicted to messaging? For some this can be quite easy. It is about how far you go to get your ‘fix’ of chatting with people you know.

If you work for a company that has blocked your favourite messaging site, then you use search engines to find alternatives – you use one of the ‘framed’ or java based sites, as the chances are your IT department has not blocked that yet… One of the better known MSN/ Yahoo replacements is ebuddy. This is a great site which allows you to access your instant messaging site and avoid the block on some company firewalls. When your company stops one you happily spend time searching for another.


Taking it to extremes
What knocks some people ‘off balance’ is the use of personal/ social networking and dating sites. Here users await messages from people they do not know, checking in many times a day. When a new message appears in your inbox this causes a completely different reaction to messages in ‘conventional’ email inboxe. For many it causes a flood of adrenalin and endorphins as the thought of a message causes excitement, wondering who it is from and whether it is the start of a new relationship or not. For a few, it is stronger than that, with married people looking for that illicit encounter. Then once contact has been made, that individual is then added to a messenger contact list – making talk that is more frequent inevitable. For some people this takes ‘office relationships’ to a completely different level. Then some people start to carry another (second or third mobile phone) just for contact with these ‘special friends’. This can not only lead to reductions in productivity, it can lead to individuals taking longer lunch breaks, disappearing early, well you get the picture.


Where are we spending our time?
Research has shown that the sites with us spending the most time on are: Myspace, Yahoo, Msn, ebay (being the top 4) with an adult dating site in the top 20. Sites like Myspace , Facebook and Youtube have little/ no legitimate place in the world of professional networking. As for dating or chat room sites…well that goes without saying. Yes, all of these can be great places to spend our hobby or down time, but as business tools – no.


Networking –v- Social Contact sites
Here I am going to make the distinction between the two types of networking sites. Networking sites tend to have forums and ways of finding people that have skills or experiences we are looking for. The forums tend to me places where people can share thoughts, questions and solutions, but they do so in a way that does not encourage a ‘conversation’. These sites include HRZone, TrainingZone, CIPD, TrainerBase, Linkedin etc.. Sites that can help us solve a business problem have a legitimate place in our ‘toolkit’ of solutions and organisations should encourage their use to help remain competitive and cost effective.


Are Blogs – social networking sites?
Yes and no. For me there are two types of blog – those that use social networking sites, and those that are on an individual’s professional website. For me that latter is a professional too, the former is not. In this day and age of personal networking, we need to be careful about our image. What happens if we go for a job and someone ‘Google’s’ our name – and all they find is a blog with not very business like language on it?.

For this reason, I do not encourage blogs on social networking sites for professional networking or learning.


How do we stop this excessive behaviour?
The short answer is with difficulty. While on one hand we need to educate workers to the advantages of ‘professional’ networking, we need (for reasons of productivity) to prohibit social networking. Technology can help a lot here, by blocking access to these types of sites, but as many have found out as one gets blocked another ‘route’ is discovered. Equally, many mobile phones can access these sites now, so stopping employees using their mobile may become the next big HR challenge!

How are you going to encourage appropriate networking and discourage inappropriate networking… Off to answer that flashing little orange box in the bottom of my screen….

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Mike Morrison is Director of RapidBI, a company specialising in the development of high performing businesses and individuals.