Did you know that I’ve actually been in your shoes, trying to take business results to a new level and striving to help your organization improve business performance every day?
And, because I’ve been there, I know what really works to get everyone in an organization moving together in the same direction …… and what doesn’t.
While I have been a senior organizational development and business performance excellence professional for over 20 years, my story REALLY began in 1996, when I joined the Canada Life Assurance Company in Toronto, ON, Canada as a manager in the Group Insurance Operation.
In 1997, when the VP of the Operation decided to adopt a new business management tool called the balanced scorecard, I was fortunate to be asked to be on the team tasked with developing and implementing the Group Life and Health (GLH) Balanced Scorecard.
Little did I know that this experience would change my life forever!
While it took our team 8 months to create our balanced scorecard (looking back, I can’t believe that it took us that long!), the result was an important business management tool that gave our executives AND employees new insights into what was driving our business results and how we were doing. Once our balanced scorecard was launched, we realized that it wasn’t going to run by itself. Because of a strange affinity I seemed to have with business performance management, I was given responsibility for the ongoing management and continuous improvement of both the Operation's strategic planning process and balanced scorecard. I went on to play this role for 5 years and, believe me, I learned a lot!
From making mistakes like trying to automate our balanced scorecard in Lotus Notes and not handing over the reins of the balanced scorecard meetings to the business leaders and teams who had real accountabilities for managing the business, and moving it forward, soon enough, there were big wins too. I count selecting and introducing a state of the art balanced scorecard application, creating a strategy map to help communicate our business strategy to employees and to validate the cause and effect relationships in our business (years before Kaplan and Norton wrote “Strategy Maps” in 2004), introducing an annual strategy alignment survey (and corresponding corrective action plans) across the organization, facilitating quarterly strategy execution progress review executive discussions, and using the balanced scorecard as a key cultural alignment tool in a company we acquired, as just some of the innovative and impactful ways we used business performance management and strategy execution tools and processes to raise the level of performance across the Operation (i.e. sales +250%, client retention +20%, total revenues +45%).
What a ride! The bottom line is that 5 years with my hands on the wheel showed me what the typical strategy execution and business performance management mistakes are (and how to avoid them!), and which activities have the most impact on an organization and, more importantly, the people who make the difference in an organization’s performance every day.
In 2001, I decided to leverage my process and approach, experience, and knowledge of what works and what doesn’t and I founded a consulting firm designed to solve the strategy execution challenge that most executives and business leaders struggle with every day. My goal is to help them by quickly pinpointing their critical strategy execution gaps, creating a focused action plan for improvement, and then helping them plan and manage strategy in a way that: taps into the wisdom and knowledge of their people; translates strategy into action; and sets the organization up for real, sustainable business success.
As a consultant, I have worked with business leaders and their teams in a variety of business sectors and industries in both Canada and the United States to build organizations where everyone is moving forward together in the same direction, making the right business decisions, and producing extraordinary business performance results every day.
I truly believe that every organization deserves to be the best that it can be.
How can I help you and your team make your vision of better organizational performance and extraordinary results achievement a reality today?
To find out how to contact me, please click here.
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