Business results, major change, project initiatives can be achieved more easily than imagined. Strategic Organizational Alignment shows you how and points out the reasons why most excuses businesses make for inadequate implementations are wrong. Through stories, illustrations, and step-by-step guides, Crosby shows you a simple, profound, and repeatable way to ensure your business aligns its employees and has a clear path to success. This book will help you to learn how to focus your workplace on the dynamics critical to achieving greater productivity.

Shortlisted for the 2020 Business Book Awards Why do some businesses thrive, while many more struggle and fail? A key reason – and the focus of this book – is strategic alignment. This is the careful arrangement of the various elements of an enterprise – from its business strategy to its organisation – to best support the fulfillment of its long-term purpose. The best-aligned enterprises are the best performing. Most executives recognise that their enterprises should be managed in this aligned way, but lack a robust system of thought to allow them to execute strategic alignment effectively and realise its full benefits. There are thousands of organisations globally that are operating below their potential simply because they are not aligned. This book aims to change that. In Align, Jonathan Trevor provides a blueprint for how strategic alignment can be effectively developed, implemented and sustained. Drawing upon active research at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School (with contributions from the joint works of Dr Jonathan Trevor and Dr Barry Varcoe), Jonathan also provides practical case studies and evidence-based insights – culminating in a thoughtful and compelling message to help leaders everywhere to improve their alignment and enterprise performance.

"Books and articles come and go, endlessly. But a few do stick, and this book is such a one. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process broke fresh ground in the understanding of strategy at a time when thinking about strategy was still in its early days, and it has not been displaced since." —David J. Hickson, Emeritus Professor of International Management & Organization, University of Bradford School of Management Originally published in 1978, Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process became an instant classic, as it bridged the formerly separate fields of strategic management and organizational behavior. In this Stanford Business Classics reissue, noted strategy scholar Donald Hambrick provides a new introduction that describes the book's contribution to the field of organization studies. Miles and Snow also contribute new introductory material to update the book's central concepts and themes. Organizational Strategy, Structure, and Process focuses on how organizations adapt to their environments. The book introduced a theoretical framework composed of a dynamic adaptive cycle and an empirically based strategy typology showing four different types of adaptation. This framework helped to define subsequent research by other scholars on important topics such as configurational analysis, organizational fit, strategic human resource management, and multi-firm network organizations.

As an L&D professional, you know not to take a client request at face value. But can you steer misguided initiatives in the right direction, arriving at a solution that works for your customers and your company? Partner for Performance is the key to aligning your learning and development role with your organization's greatest needs. Performance improvement specialists Ingrid Guerra-López and Karen Hicks offer a framework for fast-tracking your growth as an ally to managers and a consultant to business leaders. Their structured, yet versatile method is a fit for any organization, and you can use it throughout the learning-solution process. Form lasting partnerships with stakeholders. Generate, share, and use performance data that support decision making and action. And help your organization avoid failed training initiatives that waste effort, time, and money, while brewing employee disengagement. Change the L&D status quo and build credibility for your department --Partner for Performance will show you how.

There are hidden laws at work in every aspect of your business. Understand them, and you can create extraordinary growth. Ignore them, and you run the risk of becoming another statistic. It's become almost cliche: 8 out of every 10 new ventures fail. Of the ones that succeed, how many truly thrive-for the long run? And of those that thrive, how many continually overcome their growth hurdles ... and ultimately scale, with meaning, purpose, and profitability? The answer, sadly, is not many. Author Lex Sisney is on a mission to change that picture. After more than a decade spent leading and coaching high-growth technology companies, Lex discovered that the companies that thrive do so in accordance with 6 Laws - universal principles that govern the success or failure of every individual, team, and organization.

"Mastering the Cube" skillfully lays out proven organization design principles. Comparing today's complex organizations to a Rubik's Cube, the authors explain how focusing improvement efforts on just one or two facets of the organization is akin to concentrating on just one side of the cube. Doing so is bound to affect-and more likely jumble-the other areas needed to generate a healthy and sustainable organization. They advocate stepping back and taking a systems-wide, comprehensive view of change and bringing all elements into alignment with strategy. They describe eight common beliefs and missteps that cause leaders to stumble, and they offer eight building blocks to effectively orchestrate complex organizational change. Written for both business leaders and their change partners in human resources, organization effectiveness, organization design, strategy, information technology, and process or continuous improvement (e.g., Lean Six Sigma), the book offers practical wisdom to help readers develop a shared perspective on organization design and achieve positive business results. It also outlines key principles and concepts for leading effective organization alignment-and moving your organization into a productive, rewarding future. Whether the transformation before you involves restructuring, consolidations, or mergers and acquisitions, this resource provides the guidance you'll need to become skilled in the important, real work of strategic organizational alignment. "This is a great step-by-step how-to manual on defining and changing the design of your company. If you're facing such challenges and have only time to read one thing, read this. It is omniscient, efficient and sufficient." --Clayton Christensen, Professor, Harvard Business School "A must read for C-Suite execs interested in cutting the fat and preserving the muscle. Mastering the Cube: Overcoming Stumbling Blocks and Building an Organization that Works is a blueprint for smart, engaging cost reduction and efficiency no matter the circumstances." --Joe Nothwang, President, Rentals and Leasing, the Americas and Asia, Hertz Corporation "The 8 stumbling blocks are an excellent reminder of the all-too-often misguided approach and beliefs at play within businesses tackling organization transformation and change. Mastering the Cube offers thoughtful and practical wisdom and techniques for any leader who seeks to ensure that the organization design efforts they undertake are aligned with strategy and result in sustainable business impact." --Angela S. Lalor, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Danaher "This book doesn't sugar coat the tough choices with which organization leaders are confronted For those who have the courage to move forward, " Mastering the Cube "is a practical and valuable guide to aligning organization "choices" to strategy. I found the guidance equally applicable to all types of organizations: for-profit, government, and non-profit." --Ann R. Henry, Vice President, Global Operations, Cisco Capital Mastering the Cube "is a guide organization architects can use to maneuver through the critical steps to produce an organization that works. Nicely done." --Larry Costello, Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resource Officer, Tyco International AlignOrg Solutions is an international consultancy serving enterprises of all sizes and types to clarify strategy, align organizational choices, build organization capabilities, manage and implement change, and develop alignment leadership. The firm offers a high-engagement approach, exceptional alignment tools, and hard-won expertise in leading organization transformation projects. They are respected worldwide for helping leaders and their change partners align the choices in their organizations with a differentiated strategy for future success.

Aligning an organization’s goals and strategies requires specifying their rationales and connections so that the links are explicit and allow for analytic reasoning about what is successful and where improvement is necessary. This book provides guidance on how to achieve this alignment, how to monitor the success of goals and strategies and use measurement to recognize potential failures, and how to close alignment gaps. It uses the GQM+Strategies approach, which provides concepts and actionable steps for creating the link between goals and strategies across an organization and allows for measurement-based decision-making. After outlining the general motivation for organizational alignment through measurement, the GQM+Strategies approach is described concisely, with a focus on the basic model that is created and the process for creating and using this model. The recommended steps of all six phases of the process are then described in detail with the help of a comprehensive application example. Finally, the industrial challenges addressed by the method and cases of its application in industry are presented, and the relations to other approaches, such as Balanced Scorecard, are described. The book concludes with supplementary material, such as checklists and guidelines, to support the application of the method. This book is aimed at organization leaders, managers, decision makers, and other professionals interested in aligning their organization’s goals and strategies and establishing an efficient strategic measurement program. It is also interesting for academic researchers looking for mechanisms to integrate their research results into organizational environments.

Find out what your customers and employees are really thinking with this indispensable resource Scaling Conversations: How Leaders Access the Full Potential of People delivers invaluable strategies for how leaders can make their communications more inclusive and access the voices of those employees who rarely feel empowered to speak up. As constituent numbers scale, leaders have traditionally struggled to make communications a conversation with the entire organization, settling instead for small focus groups, talking at people in town halls, and delivering surveys after the fact. The result is exclusive, narrow decision-making that disengages and under-utilizes talent and human capital. And now, as the remote environment grows, the challenge and imperative for engaging conversations on a wider scale is even greater. Scaling Conversations provides the solution. Having led a remote team for over a decade and having worked with thousands of leaders across North America, Dave MacLeod teaches you how to: Scale your business by listening to the voices that really matter Access and maximize the human capital in your organization Make decisions that create unity and move the group forward Decrease employee turnover caused by poor communication Within these pages, you'll learn how to better facilitate conversations with a wider and more representative array of clients and employees, and not just the loudest ones in the town hall meeting or Slack channel. Perfect for any leader who's responsible for understanding what employees are really feeling and thinking, Scaling Conversations also belongs on the bookshelves of anyone who wants to learn how to discover what the “silent majority,” who are often drowned out by the loudest people in the room, actually believes.

Technology is constantly changing the way enterprises conduct business by optimizing current practices. As information technology continues to evolve and become a prevalent feature in day-to-day activities within organizations, it has become necessary to manage these technologies in order to meet the strategic objectives of an organization. Strategic IT Governance and Alignment in Business Settings investigates emergent research methodologies involving the application of information technology in organizations. Focusing on best practices, implementation issues, and empirical research within the field, this book is ideally suited for researchers, academics, students, and practitioners interested in the governance, strategy, architecture, and management of information systems.

CEOs regularly identify strategic execution as their biggest challenge, and the top priority facing today's business leaders. Based on their research with senior executives across a variety of industries—and including firms like Marriott, Microsoft, SunTrust, UPS, and Vail Resorts—Kenneth J. Carrig and Scott A. Snell have distilled the elements that are most critical for execution. This book addresses the challenges of execution, why it matters, and why the approach remains elusive. It introduces an integrated framework for understanding four priorities underlying execution excellence. Ultimately, it all comes down to alignment, agility, ability, and architecture. The authors lay out a process for applying the framework, helping business leaders to diagnose their challenges and to determine their path toward breakthrough performance.