New Business Book Diagnoses Corporate America With Attention Deficit Disorder

OAKLAND, Calif., Feb. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- American business has been diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

"The corporate landscape is cluttered with jargon, consultants, and fads," says Michael Kanazawa, CEO of Dissero Partners, and co-author with Robert H. Miles of the forthcoming book Big Ideas to Big Results: Remake and Recharge Your Company, Fast (FT Press; $27.95 hardcover).

Less than half of employees, according to a poll cited in the book, understand their company's strategic goals and only 43 percent believe there is ever any follow-through on planned strategy shifts.

"We are caught in the clutches of organizational A.D.D., with leaders steering rapidly from ditch to ditch, darting off at the next big idea that comes along," says Kanazawa. "This behavior actually kills any momentum the company would have built by staying the course, learning from doing and working out the fundamentals."

Focus is not only lost on new ideas, the authors stress.

"If they aren't killed," the authors warn, "those old Zombie projects will diffuse needed focus and squander scarce resources, making the organization slow to execute and causing silos to form. You have to align your organization around core initiatives."

Kanazawa and Miles provide these tips for creating alignment among corporate teams:

Quickly address even small deviations from the focus at the top as these get magnified going down. Senior executives cast big shadows.

Drive accountability throughout the entire organization through setting individual commitments to action at all levels.

Restack all priorities top to bottom or you will, by definition, only be playing on the margins with incremental changes.

Reset investment and operating budget levels to align with the initiative priorities.

Establish clear guidelines for resource allocation that will enable you to quickly identify and kill the Zombie projects before they kill your transformation.

"To achieve rigor and accountability in execution," Kanazawa says, "Companies need to empower people instead of frustrating them and harness energy rather than wasting it."

For more information, visit http://www.BigIdeastoBigResults.com.