| Issue 24 |

Strategy and HR - Part I

An organization’s human resources are an important component of the organization’s development capabilities and actualization of its business strategy. How is it possible to verify whether the people in the organization are indeed promoting the desired strategy? We will currently focus on consolidating a management team that is compatible with the development and support of a successful strategy:

• Consolidate a good management team (a good CEO is not enough): A CEO on his own, regardless of how talented, will not suffice in building a great organization. Typically, when brilliant CEOs leave, the organization deteriorates, and therefore in order to ensure continuity, a good management team must be recruited and only afterwards a strategy is jointly developed.
• Get the right people “on the bus”: Jim Collins’ book “Good to Great” compares companies that made the leap to leaders in their field, with those that simply remained good, but not great. The most important finding in the book, which is very relevant to the topic of strategy, is that in order to become a market leader, the first step is to recruit a good management team and only afterwards to plan the strategy together. In other words, first who (getting on the bus)…. and only later what (the destination).
• Reward in order to recruit, regardless of performance: There is apparently no connection between reward and performance and making a company great. Reward enables hiring and keeping the right people, but it does not cause the wrong people to do the right things.
• Hire according to character: It turns out that the right person is exactly that thanks to his/her inborn character and capabilities, and not due to knowledge, background, education or acquired skills. In case of doubt – it’s best not to hire. Although finding the right people is a bottleneck process that slows down the company’s growth rate, hiring the wrong people will delay growth even more.
• Change seats instead of firing: Companies that became great have virtually no dismissals in their management. Recruited personnel either leave shortly after being hired (if an incompatibility is discovered) or they stay with the company for many years. When the CEO decides to make a change, he takes into account that he has good managers in the organization, and therefore in most cases he will find the relevant person another position (he will seat him somewhere else on the bus) and not fire him.
• Connect good people to opportunities (not to problems) : Good people can help the organization grow, and it’s important to appoint them to positions in which this can manifest itself. Instead of letting them solve the business’s difficult problems (which will burn them out and not fulfill their true potential), they should be given the opportunity to manage growing and developing areas, in other words, to manage the future. Gary Hamel’s book “Leading the Revolution” also stresses this point, and urges CEOs to appoint the very best people for internal and daring enterprises, that can ensure future revenues.
• A strategic plan – argue and then commit: Arguments are apparently a good thing. In companies that became great, the management fervently argues during the process of consolidating a strategic plan. It’s apparently better than agreeing upon a compromise that leads to mediocrity. But once the decision has been made, they unite behind the decision and leave their personal interests behind. It’s a matter of character and therefore, as previously mentioned, it will only succeed if people with the right characters are hired.
• And let’s say that there is a strategic plan, how can its implementation be ensured? This is already a topic in and of itself, which we will discuss in the next Focus section...

• For workshops on Strategy and Marketing: click here (PDF booklet, in Hebrew)
• For articles on strategy and other topics: click here
• Information on strategic consulting: click here

Ideas for innovation in reading or reference books

The following ideas were developed using various thinking tools, and do not exist at present (to the best of our knowledge):

1. 1. A book that can be dismantled according to chapters – each part is one chapter (easy to carry).
2. A book that has a place to write who the book belongs to on the cover (so that it won’t get stolen).
3. A book with blank lines at the bottom of each page – to write comments during reading.
4. A book with letters that get smaller as reading progresses (to encourage faster reading).
5. An entire book written in mirror writing (to practice reading mirror writing).
6. A book where every right page is in Hebrew and every left page has the identical content in English (for learning English).
7. A book in a foreign language where the difficult words can be lifted up to reveal the translation underneath.
8. A sample book – each page features the opening page of a different book (helps in choosing which entire book to read).
9. A purse-book – a book that combines or is integrated with a wallet / purse – convenient for traveling or carrying to a café, for example.
10. A puzzle book – with perforated pages that must be organized in order and assemble a complete book (a game).

• Articles on Systematic Innovation  
• To learn about Systematic Innovation Workshops : click here
• We will be glad to read your comments and suggestions

Hebrew/English

If you are interested in the Hebrew to English or English to Hebrew translation of a word or phrase, and WORD’s dictionary hasn’t yielded sufficient results, Morfix, the online dictionary, will do the job even better than Babylon, and for free. Morfix is a service provided by Melingo, a company that specializes in Semitic language computerization (Hebrew and Arabic). Morfix is a clever dictionary that recognizes inflections of words in Hebrew and English (morphology), and translate them accurately. For example – if you type the Hebrew word “nashim”, you will get two Hebrew results: (1) “isha” = woman, wife, and also (2) “sham” = to put, to appoint.

Morfix also recognizes common phrases and they can be entered without quotations in order to obtain a correct translation. For example, the Hebrew phrase “meorav yerushalmi” will be translated into “mixed grill” in English, which sounds a lot simpler, doesn’t it? The Morfix dictionary can also handle Hebrew spelling with and without “vowels”, and spelling variations of the same word (colour, color).

Another useful characteristic of Mofix’s website is the ability to conduct a direct search of the translation results via a number of different search engines such as Google and Yahoo!. The first result of a search on “mixed grill” yields a cooking recipe, which can be useful if you decide to host someone from abroad instead or taking him or her to a restaurant.

Apropos restaurants, when you are abroad and don’t understand what’s written on the menu, a quick visit to the Morfix site (for example if your mobile phone has a web browser) will solve the mystery, and you can also venture so far as to request some of your favorite foods by virtue of a few more translated terms. Oh, by the way, don’t try this France… the chefs there will not be impressed!
 

• For the Morfix site : www.morfix.com