STRATEGIC ALIGNMENT PRACTICE

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WHY ARE CEO'S FIRED?
By Henrik Ekelund, President & CEO, BTS Group AB

Research shows that 70% of fired CEOs are terminated not because they lacked vision, but because they failed to engage their organization in carrying out their inspired strategies.

But surely, you say, any halfway intelligent leader must be aware that they can’t succeed on their own devices. In today’s Web-conferenced world, how difficult can it be to communicate across the organization the specific support required to carry out planned initiatives and achieve financial targets? Despite advances in technology that enable the best internal communication ever, CEOs are finding it increasingly difficult to engage, align, and develop strategic execution capability among their leaders.

One at-risk CEO we spoke with had this to say:

"Our vision and strategy ought to be crystal clear. They are well documented and communicated every which way. The problem is every business unit understands things differently and goes its own direction. Barriers form between functions that ought to be cooperating. A strategy that everybody seemed to agree on dissipates in 1,001 directions, while all sense of urgency is lost."

A middle manager in the same company said:

"Every day is a battle to live up to the expectations of our customers, carry out my management team’s strategy, and stay ahead of the competition. However, no one has told me why we should fight this battle, and what the consequences would be of winning or losing. Meanwhile, why are departments we should be cooperating with shooting at different targets?"

In a recent poll of 2,000 senior executives, strategic alignment and speed of execution emerged as the most pressing challenges facing senior leaders.

It is our experience that no organization can achieve strategic alignment or improved speed of execution by communication alone. Elaborate kick-off events, monthly Web-conferenced "town meetings," and executive-hosted lunchtime roundtables are not enough. Widely circulated consultant master plans and IT investments in improving real-time information availability are still not enough.

To align managers and employees to your company’s vision and strategy and to increase your speed of execution, you need to couple the right learning environment with business initiatives that offer the promise of immediate payback.

What do we mean by “the right learning environment”?

Many well-meaning change initiatives begin with a search by higher-ups for a closed-loop "perfect system" for orchestrating the change throughout the organization. Once this is discovered, it becomes time to train the “users” in implementing the system. This egotistical approach – with communication trickling down from the upper reaches of the organization – is where visionary leadership meets its "Waterloo."

Transformational leaders know better than to force-feed employees they have supposedly hired to think for themselves with fait-accompli solutions and unassailable arguments. They understand it is better to let valuable employees discover the advantages of new approaches on their own terms and develop action plans that reflect their specialized expertise and enterprise role. The result is enterprise-wide motivation and inspiration and a "can-do" culture that remains true to core beliefs while continually adapting and changing. They know how to build a "learning environment."

Strategic alignment and speed of execution for business define the raison d’être of BTS: to develop the mindset and capabilities your people need to accelerate change and business results.

We have the privilege of working with many of the great business organizations that demonstrate excellence in strategic alignment and are adept at speedy execution: AT&T, Coca-Cola, Ericsson, Procter & Gamble, and Toyota, to name a few. And we are working with newer companies that have quickly emerged as "ones to watch" for the same reasons. We also are honored to be catalysts for your profitability and growth, and always aim to live that vision. (In case you missed it, BTS' vision and strategy are to help accelerate your profitability and growth, and we're honored to do it every day.)

For more information on our Strategic Alignment Capability, please contact Rommin Adl at rommin.adl@bts.com or (203) 943-4800 or visit our website at http://www.bts.com.

SUCCESS CASE

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DEVELOPING NEXT-GENERATION FRONTLINE LEADERS: YOUR KEYS TO SUCCESS
By Tim Blakesly, Bianca Cowan and Rommin Adl

Yesterday’s "supervisor" has become today’s "frontline leader."

Why? Because more is expected of them.

If you are responsible for developing your frontline leaders, more is expected of you, as well. Here’s what you’re up against.

• It’s no longer enough for first-level managers to simply communicate or trickle down top-management priorities. With today’s Web conference functionality, top management is fully capable of doing these themselves. Today’s frontline leaders must be able to defend enterprise priorities in terms their people can readily understand and answer the question, "What does this mean for us?" to achieve work unit buy-in and change behaviors. So you’ll need to train your frontline leaders in business acumen to help them "think like the CEO."
• When employees and work units understand the core values of their enterprise, they’ll know how to react to even the most unexpected contingency in a way that does the organization proud. If your frontline leaders aren’t trained in how to exhibit and articulate these core values in everyday situations, then your organization is at risk.
• Today’s frontline leaders need to become champions of change. They’ll need new skills to help their people revisit entrenched work processes that no longer may be relevant and understand why embracing change is consistent with their career interests.
• More will be expected of you in how you choose to train and equip your new frontline leaders as well. These next-generation learners won’t take well to lectures, and will want to put any new knowledge to the test. So you’ll want to employ experiential methods such as business simulations, engage maps, and a variety of other technologies, and have learners deal with the very same scenarios they are likely to encounter on the job. When practical, you’ll also want to provide some sort of “performance dashboard” so learners can model the impact of their decisions and discover for themselves, in a risk-free environment, what works best.

Ideally, you’ll want to stage the learning over time, so individuals can assess where they’ve been and build experience in a natural, graduated way. And you’ll want to involve senior management in both developing and assessing the learning.

Finally, it is mission-critical that the leaders of the learners are actively engaged in the process early and often. They should be the ones to communicate purpose for the learning intervention and ensure accountability throughout the process. This is the best way to guarantee business impact (see BTS Advantage Way Process to learn more about our approach in this area).

What is the effect of a high-impact experiential approach to developing leaders?

BTS has implemented several large-scale frontline Leadership Development Curricula over the years, particularly with companies such as Amgen, Boeing, and Dell. Recently companies that include GlaxoSmithKline and Philip Morris International have entrusted BTS with the task of developing new Frontline Curricula, demonstrating the innovation and global reach that BTS has in this area.

The results speak for themselves:

Essentials of Business Leadership Program was rated the #1 program at the Boeing Leadership Institute for each year of its 3-year run. Over 5,000 experienced and new frontline leaders participated.

Most recently, BTS helped Philip Morris International create three new programs: Driving Business Knowledge, Advanced Management Skills and most importantly Managing People for the First Time (MPFT). MPFT is a 3-day workshop that turbo charges first-time managers with a learning-system approach to human performance. The program enables managers to use their delegation, decision making, coaching, and feedback skills. The event formally becomes a leadership transformation through the combination of a highly engaging scenario simulation and adult learning-based map technology. The third day solidifies the managers’ ability to be effective at performance management by implementing a systems-thinking approach to human performance.

Is your organization in the process of evaluating your frontline leadership development curriculum? If so, please contact BTS to learn more about how we can transform your front-line leaders to deliver even greater business results.

Visit our Web site at www.bts.com, or contact Tim Blakesly, Managing Director, Leadership and Management Practice, BTS USA: tim.blakesly@bts.com or (562) 426-5688.

Do you qualify to attend a free session of our industry-leading frontline leadership program,
Essentials of Business Leadership? To learn more visit our free offer page.

SALES PRACTICE

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THE KEY TO SALES TRANSFORMATION SUCCESS
By Lou Schachter

Remember Twister™? The kids’ game where you spin a dial and get instructions to put your left foot on red and your right hand on green? Before long everyone is tangled together and dropping in a heap, laughing hysterically. Unfortunately, a lot of direction that salespeople receive today is much like, “Put your left hand on yellow. Now place your right foot on blue.” As a result, salespeople are overwhelmed, confused, and quite frankly, tangled, and no one is happy.

At BTS, we’re fortunate to work with many of the leading sales forces in the world, and we have noticed a new single-minded focus that differentiates the best from the rest.

Leading sales forces today have recognized that their markets are changing. Customers won’t pay more than rock-bottom prices for basic products, and they are becoming increasingly skeptical about the added value in so-called “packaged solutions.” Instead, what customers seek are suppliers who will help them accelerate their desired business results.

What does this new outcomes-oriented role look like?

• Historically, most salespeople have not needed to scratch below the surface in understanding their customers’ businesses. Today they have to know what the customer’s goals are, what metrics they use to measure success, and what business challenges they face. Only then can they help accelerate the customer’s results.
• Top salespeople are learning new ways to ask questions that get at what the customer is trying to achieve, and they are quantifying the end-game value their offerings can provide.
• In today’s world, salespeople are becoming change agents for customers. This requires developing and applying skills in change management, facilitation, and collaborative negotiation.
• No longer is account strategy work an academic exercise. Today’s best sales forces develop joint account strategies in collaboration with the customer and align them around the customer’s goals.

Untwisting the tangled knot of sales activities requires two big things: a vision for where the sales force is headed and articulation of the steps and behaviors that are required to get there. That is what we call “sales transformation,” and that is what is separating the best from the rest in today’s difficult economy.

For more information regarding our BTS Sales Practice please contact Shannon Dodd at shannon.dodd@bts.com. Also, please visit Lou Schachter featured article entitled "Seven Strategies for Surpassing Sales Stress" in today's SMM Newsletter from Neilson Media, publishers of Training and Sales and Marketing Management.

NEWSWIRE

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VIRTUAL BUSINESS TOURNAMENTS UP THE ANTE

What begins with an exciting, fierce competition and ends with an all-expense-paid trip to Cannes, France? BTS Global Business Tournament! Meet one of this year’s semi-finalist teams and find out who is competing in the 2009 BTS Global Tournament.

After its launch in February, the BTS Tournaments started generating excitement and fierce competition among leading international companies. Each year, approximately 900 teams compete in a highly engaging, asynchronous business simulation experience conducted over the Web. The combination of pre-work, simulation experience, post-work and application builds teamwork and the business acumen that participants need to accelerate their business results. The top three teams are invited to the BTS Global Business Tournament Awards in Cannes.

The 2009 BTS Global Business Tournament Champion Teams will be determined later in the year. StatoilHydro Business Development has won a spot in this year’s semi-finals.

The following is a first-hand account of the experiences of the StatoilHydro team:

“The BTS Tournament certainly triggered our competitive instincts, and our goal was of course to win! In the first round we planned fairly safely. We made our decisions based on analyses without taking much risk, which resulted in reasonably good results. There was another team that did exceptionally well and obtained a huge lead, which made us realize the importance of our competitors. Therefore we worked even harder during the next simulation rounds to understand our environment and lay out a strategy on how to catch up to the leading team.

"We believe spending the necessary time to investigate the details paid off. We were also courageous and added a good portion of common sense; we had to stick to our strategy as well as adapt to the changing environment. This has made us more aware of how to treat uncertainty in decision making."

"Our team is composed of members from three nationalities based in four locations on two continents. As a result, the work was conducted by switching from one language to the other via phone and video conferences (and not necessarily during regular office hours). Meetings were also held at airports, in taxis, and even from the delivery room (one of the team members became a dad the day before the third round). We clearly see the potential for our business!"

To read more about the winning teams’ experiences, visit: http://btstournaments.blogspot.com.

BTS 2010 Global Tournament
In the BTS 2010 Global Tournament, which kicks off in September, over 60 teams from 30 companies and 20 countries are competing. Among others, companies taking part include AstraZeneca, Ericsson, NSN, Sandvik, SEB, Syngenta, and many more. Industries represented include Chemical, Consulting, Finance, Manufacturing, Medical, and Telecom

For more information about BTS Tournaments and an opportunity for a complimentary, no-obligation Tournament tour, visit our offer page.

NEWSWIRE

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EXPERIENCE A COMPLETELY NEW GENERATION OF VIRTUAL WORLD BUSINESS SIMULATIONS

BTS has teamed with new media innovator Visual Purple to bring to the world of business the high-involvement, self-discovery learning found in consumer virtual world experiences like SimCity and Second Life.

“Winning in Wireless” ports an existing BTS business acumen simulation into a virtual world where participants become totally immersed in determining how to optimize the success of their enterprise in the face of a phalanx of industry-specific challenges and threats.

This proof-of-concept tour de force illustrates first hand how to employ virtual worlds to accelerate the acquisition of difficult concepts through an almost mesmerizing level of engagement that sustains participant attention and ensures that key learning discoveries will be retained.

Why virtual worlds for serious business simulations?

Virtual worlds work! Virtual worlds are proven to effectively engage at many levels and are a potent tool when unleashed with purpose and resolve. Learners can access a business simulation and drive its evolution while witnessing first-hand the results of their interactions. This reality-based, interactive virtual world combines proven instructional design and cutting-edge technology to effectively showcase the value of using virtual world simulation environments to create complex and in-depth training platforms. Reduced training time and improvement of overall job effectiveness are immediate benefits. In addition to providing an interesting environment and experience for individual learners, the virtual world simulation provides cross training designed to increase organizational effectiveness by familiarizing users with the tasks, skills, and difficulties faced by others within the organization – a truly powerful way to "walk in the shoes of your colleagues."

A more affordable option compared with other "traditional simulation" options, BTS’ and Visual Purple’s virtual world model allows companies to reduce training costs by up to two-thirds. This ability to drive down costs per seat is very appealing to corporations, especially in today’s economic climate, and was a primary driver in the selection of virtual world technology for this project.

The immersive virtual world training environment provides the context and framework for users to learn, but it is the user who builds the details of the story as they go. The pedagogy behind this type of "bottom up" training is instructionally proven; users learn by doing, creating stories as they accomplish their quests (jobs, tasks, missions, etc.). The freedom, choice, and discovery incorporated into this type of instructional design are not only highly engaging, but also provide the most cost-effective training.

Additionally, clients value the greater flexibility of the virtual world medium, the enhanced user experience, and the opportunity for richer data collection. In addition to the greater efficacy and enhanced user experience, the greatest value has been cost savings. The virtual world production process produces high-impact learning for a fraction of the cost of producing similar training in a traditional, 3D simulation format. Be on the cutting edge of learning and development; visit the following link to learn more: http://www.visualpurple.com/Trailers/wiw_trailer.htm. Or contact Dave Ackley at dave.ackley@bts.com or (203) 316-2740 to see if virtual world simulation is the right fit for your organization for increased training value and high return on investment (ROI).