Knowing vs. Doing
ideate from ax09001h on Vimeo.In the above recent TV ad, IBM pokes fun at those businesses (and consultants) who seem to over-value planning while under-valuing the implementation side of management--sort of a "knowing instead of doing" problem. In IBM's ad, a manager opens up a quiet room and flips the light on, only to find a large group of employees all lying on the ground quietly on their kindergarten mats and staring up at the ceiling. When he questions what they are doing, one employees responds "Ideating." Others separately join in to flesh out the answer by tossing out words such as, "Structure," "Process," and "We need to innovate." When they're finished, the manager asks how they intend to do all of those things. Their answer? "We haven't ideated that yet." The manager wishes them good luck, turns out the light and closes the door.
It's all in good fun, of course, but what makes it funny is that we've all found ourselves scratching our heads at times and wondering the same thing. How come we seem to spend so much more time talking about doing than actually getting something done? At work, at church, at home, even personally. If you're interested in how to change this paradigm and didn't get around to this resource when it first came out, I urge you to take a look at Pfeffer & Sutton's The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 2000). The book's certainly a great resource to read but also then to keep in a visible place in your office or at home where you won't be sucked back into the land of ideation. For a nice summary of Pfeffer and Sutton's work, visit this link at FastCompany There's also a nice summary of the book available in FastCompany.com.
For those of you constantly looking for a fresh perspective to challenge your thinking on the topic of leadership, check out Steve Farber's blog at 
Don't you wish more city leaders had chosen the path of Coral Springs (FL) leadership?! C.S. is the 13th largest municipality in the State of Florida and late this past year they became the first municipality to receive the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award from the U.S. President. Back in the early 1990s, city leaders decided there was a better way to run city hall than the traditional stereotypical approach. So they began making strategic decisions based on a total quality management framework designed around performance targets like resident and business satisfaction, stakeholder partnerships, and overall continuous improvement. 
Yesterday, a few of us from Belmont were treated to a first-rate tour of the national headquarters and on-site assisted-living community for a company that is continuously improving the post-retirement living experience for numerous U.S. seniors and their families.
One of our friends, Charles Hagood (Massey MBA, '93), from Healthcare Performance Partners has worked with his colleague to develop a very creative Top 10 List for how to kill one's "lean healthcare transformation". Lean techniques are making rapid gains in the healthcare industry as companies struggle with skyrocketing costs, nursing shortages and poor employee satisfaction while simultaneously facing pressure to improve healthcare service to customers. The entire Top 10 list can be found at 
The following post is from our good friend Joe Scarlett, the non-executive chairman of the board of Tractor Supply Co., the largest retail farm and ranch store chain in the United States. Joe served as the company's CEO until 2004, and more recently launched the Scarlett Leadership Institute here at Belmont. As you can imagine, he knows quite a bit about holding CEOs, and the boards who pay them, accountable for performance. 
Earlier today, U.S. Secretary Carlos Gutierrez announced the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award recipients for 2007. This year marks the 20th anniversay of the award initially established in 1987 through an act of the U.S. Congress at the urging of President Ronald Reagan. This is also the first year that nonprofit/government organizations were eligibile for consideration, and two of this year's winners fit that newly-defined category.
Well, yesterday, about 150 of us spent the morning learning about a different hamburger university and its parent company--Pal's Sudden Service and their Business Excellence Institute. The event was hosted by Cat Financial and billed as a "best practices sharing day" by the Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence. 
Twice in the last two weeks I've spent the better part of a day discussing performance excellence systems with area healthcare companies. As someone who is peering toward his own healthcare horizon with the perspective of an aging baby boomer, I have to admit I like the trend I'm seeing these days. We can debate issues of "motive," but the reality is that the quality and performance of healthcare systems in the U.S. is becoming an area of increasing focus by the healthcare companies themselves. Plagued by skyrocketing costs and employee resource problems, even maintaining current healthcare quality levels is no easy task. 
Consumer Reports just released its latest report on automobile reliability (October 2007), and for the first time in several years, three of Toyota's models did not make the recommended list. It just goes to show that even an organization perceived in the marketplace as the quality/reliability marketplace leader is susceptible to an occasional hiccup.