Dynamic Collaboration
Collaboration is crucial for any kind of organization that wants to be productive, adaptable, and creative. When people are collaborating, profits increase and things get done. When they’re not, your organization loses time and energy.
Why, then, do many organizations struggle to provide collaboration tools their employees will actually use? Dynamic Collaboration shows how leaders can harness the power of Web 2.0 and use it to tap into the collective intelligence of their organization.
Dynamic Collaboration offers practical advice to help you answer questions like these:
- What tools does your organization need to help facilitate collaboration?
- How do you ensure that your personnel will use those tools?
- How can you protect your privileged information from unauthorized users?
Whether you are a leader in the public or private sector or a technologist, you’ll discover ways to help your team solve problems they wouldn’t otherwise have solved, get work done quicker than ever before, and feel connected because they are working together toward a common goal.
Based on their years of experience helping organizations of all kinds–both private enterprises and government agencies–Ray Schwemmer and Rick Havrilla offer practical advice to help readers choose the right tools to facilitate collaboration and integrate them into the existing tools that employees are already using so that there is a seamless transition between working independently and working collaboratively.
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Available now from Amazon.com
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Ray Schwemmer is the president, CEO, and co-founder of CollabraSpace, a software company that has focused on secure collaboration solutions for industry and government customers since 1998. During this time he has helped customers develop solutions to integrate people, data, and processes within a single, seamless collaborative environment to enhance organizational performance. He has also worked with numerous organizations to devise strategies to increase employee participation in collaborative technologies.
Prior to starting CollabraSpace, Ray spent ten years working for various IT companies designing and building large-scale distributed systems for both commercial and government clients. Ray resides with his wife, Denise, and his daughters, Kelly and Kaitlin, in Annapolis, Maryland.
Ray can be reached at ray.schwemmer@collabraspace.com.
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Rick Havrilla is the chief technology officer and cofounder of CollabraSpace. He has over twenty years of experience designing and implementing enterprise software solutions with over ten years of experience working with collaboration technologies. Rick is a visionary who applies leading-edge technologies as well as proven technology solutions to develop innovative products and services. He has worked with numerous organizations on their system architectures to integrate collaborative solutions that fit seamlessly into their architectures and products.
In previous positions, he was responsible for designing and implementing a wide range of software solutions for both commercial and government clients. Rick lives near Baltimore, Maryland, with his wife, Stephanie, and their two children, Hannah and Clara.
Rick can be reached at rick.havrilla@collabraspace.com.
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Influence Across Boundaries
In over two decades working with leaders of Fortune 500 and international companies as well as a variety of business start-ups and nonprofit organizations, Helen Baxter-Southworth has seen how leaders struggle to succeed in a complex global business environment.
To successfully influence results, international managers require a unique set of resources. They need the ability to strategically position their initiative, successfully interact with people of diverse cultures, collaborate and manage conflict, and leverage their personal connections. These critical resources are the subject of her new book, Influence Across Boundaries: How to Succeed in a Global Business Environment, to be published in June 2011.
The book offers pragmatic tools leaders can use to deliver results and mobilize commitment across multiple boundaries. It identifies best practices based on current research and illustrates them with real-life stories. Leaders will understand the dynamics of a complex international organization and find the shared vocabulary they need to talk about these complexities with their teams.
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Available now from Amazon.com
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Helen Baxter-Southworth works with leaders at all levels in Fortune 500 and international companies as well as a variety of business start-ups and nonprofit organizations. She owns and mangages HBS & Associates, LLC, which she established in 1989 to provide executive coaching, change leadership consultation, and executive development programs. She is a member of the original international Women's Leadership Collaboration and continues to serve women as they develop their strength, purpose, and confidence. Helen lives in Ellicott City, Maryland, with her family.
To learn more about HBS & Associates, please visit Helen's website at http://hbsassoc.com.
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The Power of an Internal Franchise
What if all your employees clearly understood the purpose of your business and focused all their energies on making it successful? Imagine the possibilities if everyone in your organization started thinking and acting like an owner of the business.
The Power of an Internal Franchise offers the tools and strategies to build an ownership culture, put it to work in your business, and share the rewards of ownership with everyone.
You'll discover how to
- Find and Keep engaged and entrepreneurial employees
- Brand your workplace and create a destination for employees
- Define your company's operating model and then share it with your employees
- Link employee behavior with business performance
- Focus your entire organization on a business goal
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Available now from Amazon.com
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Building Business Value
If you’re like most leaders of a midsized company, you probably feel like you have one of the best jobs in the world. I’ve been in your shoes and have experienced many of the same hopes and fears you have. Most of the time, you would not trade your role with anyone. But there are times, probably more than you let on, when you hold what seem like contradictory positions that are virtually incompatible. For example, business may be going great, but you are always worried about the overall economy or maybe just your specific market segment. Or you now fi nd your company is past the start-up phase, but you are still obsessed about the little issues that leaders of bigger companies should not be worrying about. You handpicked your leadership team, but you are still not sure you have the right team to take you to the next level. You feel like you are on the right track, but you don’t have a scorecard to tell you where you really stand. You’ve had some success, but you are not 100 percent sure if you can repeat it. You know companies in your market are doing well, but you’ve convinced yourself there are valid reasons your growth is not where you want it to be.
It was this dichotomy that led me down the path of creating the value-building process I explain in Building Business Value. These contradictions made me wonder whether the leaders of my competition were struggling with the same issues and whether all midsized leaders struggled with these same issues. I also began to consider how large, publicly traded companies managed their way through these apparent contradictions.
While I was the CEO of CTX Corporation I really began to find the value of running our midsized company like a publicly traded firm. Not that I had to fret over Sarbanes-Oxley compliance, but I found that if I could run the company based on the collection and analysis of sound metrics and I could really find out what factors increased its value, then I could build initiatives that focused on those value drivers and let all the minutiae (that normally keep us all awake) fade away.
One more step the business leaders had to take to make this value-building process stick was that everyone who could influence the value driver had to buy into what we were doing. Sitting in an ivory tower and pulling strings (or analyzing financial statements) would not work. Each leader had to understand each value driver, the impact it had on the company, and specifically what needed to be done to move the value driver in the right direction.
This was the genesis of the value-building process. It is a leadership-driven, collaborative process that forces the executives of midsized companies to examine what is really important to their businesses. It makes you, as a leader of a mid-market company take an honest assessment of your company, paint a picture of where you want it to be, analyze the gaps, and then build transformational initiatives based on your company’s current state, the value drivers in your market, and finally, a frank evaluation of your team’s ability to execute.
You may be one of those business leaders who is a bit hesitant to go through such a process because you are not interested in selling your company or you are nervous about using the word “value” in front of your employees. As a C-level executive, your main priority and commitment to your company is to build value. If you are planning to go public in the future, you should be building value. If you plan to leave your company to your children or your employees, you should be building value. If you plan to run the company as a lifestyle company, you should be building value. If you are planning to sell today, tomorrow, next year, or five years from now, you should be building value.
Building Business Value is a book about process. My sincere desire is that any leadership team of a midsized company can quickly put to use the methods and tools found in these pages to create an actionable plan for building business value. I’ve structured the book according to the logical sequence of events for any planning session. There is a natural flow to successful business transformations, and the chapters follow that flow. Throughout the book I share success stories and anecdotes from previous work experiences as real-life examples.
I wish you the very best as you take your company on a value building journey.
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Available now from Amazon.com
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Martin O'Neill knows a lot about mid sized companies, having spent much of the last twenty five years operating, consulting to and researching companies in this market.
As a business operator, he started and sold a company, positioned another for a leveraged management buyout and helped a third sell for a significant premium.
Today, Martin runs Corsum Consulting, which focuses on one thing: helping companies build value. He is a member of the National Speakers Association and frequent speaker and consultant on leadership, corporate culture and building enterprise value. He holds a number of board level positions with mid sized companies, sits on the Business Advisory Board for the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Tech Center and lectures in UMBC’s Entrepreneurship Program. Martin lives on the Magothy River in Maryland with his wife, their three children, and their yellow lab Sunny.
To find out more about Corsum Consulting, please visit www.corsum.com.
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