How+you+Can+You+Create+More+VALUE

Can You Create More Value? 12:18 PM Wednesday February 27, 2008 by Harvard Management Update What is it that you’re doing to help your company and yourself get ahead? If you’re an effective value creator, the answer you give today will be vastly different from the one you give 18 months from now—even if your role in the organization stays the same. The most successful managers are the ones who can consistently deliver against their companies’ changing needs. As their companies shift strategies in response to competitive and market forces, they are able to shift their own strategies for producing organizational value and, just as important, for continuing their professional and personal development. Their secret is twofold. They recognize the parallels between how organizations and individuals produce value, and they understand and can address how their own biases drive their selection of value-creating activities. To create value, you must start with a clear understanding of your company’s strategy. But you need more than that, says [|Anjan Thakor], a professor of finance at the [|Olin School of Business] at Washington University in St. Louis. Few managers appreciate the value of activities in units outside their own. A multiple-perspective model Thakor and his colleagues developed helps you resolve the inherent tensions among the various paths to creating value so that you can see the contribution these other activities make to the success of your own unit and the company as a whole. It can also help you better prioritize your work by giving you a richer sense of the possibilities for creating value on the organizational and personal levels at the same time. The //competing values// model that Thakor developed in concert with [|University of Michigan Business School] professors [|Jeff DeGraff], [|Robert Quinn], and [|Kim Cameron]divides organizational value creation into four quadrants: Control. Value-enhancing activities in this quadrant include internal processes that address risk management, process efficiency, and cost productivity. This quadrant’s mantra is “Better, cheaper, surer,” writes Thakor in Becoming a Better Value Creator: How to Improve the Company’s Bottom Line—and Your Own (Jossey-Bass, 2000). Compete. This quadrant’s mantra: “Create shareholder value now and every day.” The focus here is on rapidly responding to signals in the market through external activities such as customer- satisfaction programs, outsourcing, divesting business units, and mergers and acquisitions.
 * The fourfold path to value creation**

Create. Value-enhancing activities in this quadrant deal with growing new markets and fostering disruptive innovation in the organization’s products and services. Many of these activities are risky; they have lower probabilities of success than activities in the Control and Compete quadrants and their time to payoff is more unpredictable. Collaborate. The emphasis here is on building organizational competencies and creating the right culture. Activities include leadership development programs and employee retention initiatives. Compared with the work of other quadrants, the work done here takes longer; it’s also harder to measure the tangible value of this quadrant’s activities. It takes all kinds Individuals, like organizations, need to perform activities in all four quadrants to succeed. But people tend to self-select, choosing functional areas and activities most congenial to their own interests. What’s more, because various functional areas use different vocabularies and metrics to describe and monitor their value-creation activities, people “regularly overestimate the value created by the activities in their own function or group and regularly underestimate the value created by others,” says Thakor. For example, a finance department employee, whose activities fall primarily in the Compete quadrant, may not see any value-creating benefit in the team-building and job-enrichment initiatives launched by the HR department, whose activities fall largely in the Collaborate quadrant. Viewing them as moves away from a market-facing perspective, the finance employee may even see these HR activities as destroying value. The competing values model (also known as the //wholonics// model) can help you develop the balanced perspective embraced by top value creators. Use it as a lens for analyzing whom you associate with at work and why: Are you succumbing to the natural tendency to gravitate toward people in your dominant quadrant? If your strength is in Compete quadrant activities, develop your skills in the polar opposite quadrant (the Collaborate quadrant) by getting to know more about how colleagues engaged in Collaborate activities see their work. Similarly, if your strength is in Control activities, try to learn more about how Create activities add value. Your dominant quadrant probably won’t change as you learn more about value-creating activities that fall outside of it. But you’ll come away with a better sense of how to benefit the company by coordinating your efforts with these other activities. This understanding will help you frame a personal definition of value creation that is aligned as closely as possible with how your organization defines value creation and the specific contributions it wants you to make. The key questions here are the following: • What will you focus on professionally? • How will you grow personally? • What decisions will you make on a day-to-day basis that will be different as a result of your strategy? Make two lists, advises Thakor—one describing what you’re getting paid for and one noting what else you need to do to get promoted. Write down the top two activities on each list and post them on your desk. These four become your top priorities; to help clarify your role in these activities, ask yourself the following: • What key value drivers do you control? • How do these drivers affect some measure of value that is relevant at higher organizational levels? • What innovations in the management of these drivers can you introduce? If you’re in charge of a manufacturing plant, key value drivers include your employees’ skills and training, the efficiency of the manufacturing process, and the plant’s design. But rather than paying attention to these value drivers, many managers make the mistake of focusing on the outcomes—for instance, manufacturing cycle time, product quality as measured by defects, and manufacturing cost per unit—that the value drivers create. As you address your unit’s value drivers, try to concentrate your energies on the activities you are uniquely equipped to perform. As for activities at which you are excellent, but which subordinates can perform equally well, take on as many of them as you can, but don’t hesitate to delegate the ones you can’t get to. Actively seek to delegate activities that others can perform better than you. Ditto for activities at which your performance is below average—taking these on actually destroys personal value for you. In addition to your top four priorities, identify two more activities that are not part of your job description but that would make your job more enjoyable while adding real value to the organization. If these additional activities aren’t enough to make you feel personally fulfilled within your current job description, this may be a sign that you should look for work outside the company or in another unit that is more conducive to your basic preferences. “For example, the worst thing you can do if you’re a Create quadrant type is to lock yourself up in Control quadrant activities because they will demand that you produce efficiencies even at the expense of growth, the very thing you aim to create,” says University of Michigan’s DeGraff. Add four more items to this personal statement of value: something you will do to empower yourself and three actions to empower close colleagues, including your direct reports and your boss, says Thakor. Although these activities should tie in to your dominant quadrant, they tend to deliver the most value when they tie in to the polar opposite quadrant as well. For example, a finance department manager with strengths in the Compete quadrant could empower himself and his colleagues by launching a Collaborate initiative to integrate the organization’s key financial metrics and principles into the daily decision making of all managers.
 * Seeing value through a strategic lens**

STRATEGY More than just an acronym of TCO or ROI, Laurus has practical experience and knowledge to help you with the difficult decisions for your technology. Aligning technology goals with business goals, identifying stakeholder priorities, and understanding your organizations key initiatives, Laurus can help you create more value out of technology.

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PROOF OF CONCEPT The best surprise in technology is no surprise. Test-driving your solution creates value and comfort for you and your business stakeholders. Laurus has many years of establishing support your business by working with your key business partners and helping them to see for themselves the value of the investment. Let the surprise be in the ease of the project and the confidence you have in the solution. IMPLEMENTATION Your project is more than installing hardware and software. It is testing, communication, and proving out milestone objectives. Laurus provides not only highly trained and seasoned engineers to make your project a success but the support of the business to ensure that you are receiving the information you and your business need to understand the progress and timelines. Whether it is conducting milestone checkpoint sessions with you and your stakeholders, or integration testing with your project team, Laurus is focused on your success.

EDUCATION & TRAINING A good implementation is only as good as the knowledge in the hands of your staff. In one-on-one hands-on education or group training sessions, Laurus is committed to your success. By leveraging the skills of your existing staff and adding to their knowledge base, Laurus will prepare your technology department for current and future needs.

SUPPORT Laurus is committed to your long-term success. That means ongoing support and availability for technology and business projects. Customized to meet the needs of your business, Laurus will support you with highly trained business process resources for your ERP environment or get you through the complexity of your storage technology. We are here for you

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