Listing Details
| ID: | 1064 |
| Title: | Blog Business World |
| URL: | http://blogbusinessworld.blogspot.com/ |
| Category: | Business: Small Business |
| Description: | Business, marketing, public relations, and search engine optimization for entrepreneurs. |
| Yael Zofi: A Manager's Guide To Virtual Teams - Blog Business Success Radio - 2012-02-05 00:02:00 |
Listen to Wayne Hurlbert Founder and CEO ofAIM Strategies®, Applied Innovative Management®, and author of the authoritative and practical advice filled bookA Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams,Yael Zofi, describes how virtual teams are reshaping the way we do business. Combining technology and globalization, virtual teams are the new face of teamwork in business. Yael Zofi offers advice for managing teams of people who are not in the same building, the same city, or even in the same country. Yael Zofi shares real answers to the most frequently asked questions about virtual teams, and provides best practices to ensure peak performance from all team members. Discover how to set up a virtual team the right way from the very beginning of the project, and learn how to avoid the most frequent pitfalls and mistakes made in virtual team management. Yael Zofi demonstrates how to maximize the benefits of virtual teams, including how to manage trust, communication, defusing conflict, and managing the deliverables successfully. Yael Zofi is my internet radio show guestonBlog Business Success; hosted live onBlogTalkRadio. The show airs live onTuesday, February 7, at 8:00 pm Eastern Time; 5:00 pm Pacific Time. Founder and CEO ofAIM Strategies®, Applied Innovative Management®, and author of the authoritative and practical advice filled bookA Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams,Yael Zofi, describes how virtual teams are reshaping the way we do business. You will learn: * Why virtual teams are being ever more important for companies * How to set up and manage a virtual team the right way * How to ensure that teams produce results and deliver the goods on time * What is the future of virtual teams for business and for management  Yael Zofi (photo left) s the Founder and CEO ofAIM Strategies®, Applied Innovative Management®. For 20+ years she has applied behavioral science techniques to organizations and teams and has dedicated her efforts to improving productivity in the areas of global leadership development, virtual team effectiveness and cross cultural communications. Throughout her career, Ms. Zofi worked with clients in the high-tech, financial services, pharmaceutical, healthcare, electronics and media industries as well as non-profits and educational institutions. Her organizational development work focuses on helping leaders and teams become more successful through strategic alignment and guided change. She created assessment tools, facilitated global team strategy retreats, designed international talent management programs and lead merger integrations with three global organizations. Ms. Zofi also implemented process improvement, talent retention and performance management programs across three continents. Prior to formingAIM Strategies®, Applied Innovative Management®, Ms. Zofi was Senior Vice President of Performance Management, Leadership and Organizational Development with J.P. Morgan. While at Morgan, Ms. Zofi facilitated several global transformation initiatives, including working with senior management to implement performance, customer and organizational strategies aligned with new business directions, technologies and public policies. She worked in Asia (Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Australia), Latin America (Argentina, Brazil and Mexico) and Europe (UK, France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, as well as the Eastern Block). Prior to Morgan, she spent several years with Accenture (Change Management) and Price Waterhouse Coopers (Post-Merger Integration) working on business process re-engineering and leadership development assignments. My book review ofA Manager's Guide to Virtual Teamsby Yael Zofi. Listen live on Tuesday at 8:00 pm Eastern, 5:00 pm Pacific time.  If you miss this very informative show, it will be available for free download as a podcast for iPod, iTunes, and MP3 players; or play it right on your computer. To download this, or any other of my guest interviews, go to theBlog Business Successhost pageand click on Archived Segments. Once there, click on the podcast icon at the end of the episode description, to download the show free of charge for your listening enjoyment. You can alsosubscribe to the show feed.  To call in questions for my guest, the number is:(347) 996-5832 Let's talk with founder and CEO ofAIM Strategies®, Applied Innovative Management®, and author of the authoritative and practical advice filled bookA Manager's Guide to Virtual Teams,Yael Zofi, as she describes how virtual teams are reshaping the way we do business. Combining technology and globalization, virtual teams are the new face of teamwork in business. Yael Zofi offers advice for managing teams of people who are not in the same building, the same city, or even in the same country. Yael Zofi shares real answers to the most frequently asked questions about virtual teams, and provides best practices to ensure peak performance from all team members. Discover how to set up a virtual team the right way from the very beginning of the project, and learn how to avoid the most frequent pitfalls and mistakes made in virtual team management. Yael Zofi demonstrates how to maximize the benefits of virtual teams, including how to manage trust, communication, defusing conflict, and managing the deliverables successfully onBlog Business Success Radio.  |
| Results Without Authority - Second Edition by Tom Kendrick - Book review - 2012-02-04 00:56:00 |
 Results Without Authority, Second Edition Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to You By:Tom Kendrick Published: January 29, 2012 Format: Paperback, 276 pages ISBN-10: 0814417817 ISBN-13: 978-0814417812 Publisher:AMACOM "Projects are everywhere. Some of these projects succeed; others do not. Many projects fail because the project leader lacks sufficient control to keep things moving toward a successful conclusion". writes respected consultant, program manager, educator, and speaker Tom Kendrick, in his very systematic and results oriented bookResults Without Authority, Second Edition: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to You. The author describes why projects can and do fail, why so many teams operate under managers to whom they don't report, and provides the tools and techniques to ensure that any manager can achieve superior results even when lacking direct authority. Tom Kendrick understands that managers who don't have direct authority over team members face difficult challenges in achieving the desired outcomes. For the author, this lack of control is a problem, but it's a problem with viable and practical solutions. Tom Kendrick guides the manager through the entire project management process spectrum, and shares his best practices and strategies for achieving successful results, regardless of the manager's authority level. The techniques offered by the author work for all types and sizes of projects, whether small and on site, or spread across several locations around the world.  Tom Kendrick (photo left) recognizes that managers who lack formal authority require additional tools and techniques to achieve project success. At the same time, the author also offers strategies, for managers who do have the formal authority, to avoid resorting to the counter-productive tactic of pulling rank on team members in order to gain the illusion of control. Tom Kendrick takes the manager through the entire project management process, revealing that the manager has more techniques to leverage for control, than are often thought to exist. Tom Kendrick presents what he calls the three core elements of control. The core elements are as follows: * Project processes where the manager defines clearly the project objectives and the term of its duration * Influence where managers establish effective communication to build trust * Metrics for measuring the progress of the project toward its goals The author then takes those three core elements and applies them to improve processes, enhance influence, and creating metrics through the five universal phases of projects. The five phases are as follows" * Initiating the project * Planning the process and goals * Executing the plan * Monitoring the process and its outcomes * Closing down the process For me, the power of the book is how Tom Kendrick combines a very effective project management framework, with the strategies needed, for any manager to succeed on any size or type of project. The author provides the best practices for managers to gain and maintain control over projects and project teams, regardless of their formal authority level. The tools offered work well for a manager who has no authority; or for a manager who has full authority, but seeks to avoid the problems arising from pulling rank. Tom Kendrick provides a useful and universal road map for navigating through entire projects from the very earliest planning stages to the final closing down of the project and the ending of the team. With this guide in hand, an experienced or first time manager will have the tactics needed to maintain control of the team, and achieve successful results every time. I highly recommend the very hands on and essential project team management guide bookResults Without Authority, Second Edition: Controlling a Project When the Team Doesn't Report to Youby Tom Kendrick, to managers of any experience level, on any size or type of project, who seek to gain and maintain control over their teams to ensure superior results. This book will change the way all managers approach team management, even if they lack formal authority or are located far from the project management site.  |
| Punching Out: One Year In Closing An Auto Plant by Paul Clemens - Book review - 2012-02-03 00:29:00 |
 Punching Out One Year in a Closing Auto Plant By:Paul Clemens Published: January 17, 2012 Format: Paperback, 288 pages ISBN-10: 0767926935 ISBN-13: 978-0767926935 Publisher:Anchor Books "The trip to Mexico would cap a process that had begun two and a half years before, on May 15, 2006, when ThyssenKrupp Budd, citing the declining sales of the Ford SUVs for which it supplied components, announced that it would close its Detroit plant by year's end", writes award winning journalist Paul Clemens, in his thought provoking and often heart breaking bookPunching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant. The author describes the process of how the venerable and iconic Budd Company Detroit plant was dismantled and transported to Mexico, and shares stories of people's lives, the state of the auto industry, and of the future of work in America. Paul Clemens understands the historic significance of the dismantling of the Budd Detroit plant as part of a larger decline in America's once unchallenged supremacy in manufacturing. The Detroit based auto industry was the symbol of that manufacturing might. Paul Clemens points to the pride of Detroit, and its central position in American industry, and how that place and its proud moments are now a fading memory. The taking apart, piece by piece, of the Budd plant in Detroit represents a microcosm of the end of an era in America. The author presents the plant closing as the slow death of American industry, and the removal of heart and dignity of the American working class.  Paul Clemens (photo © Elizabeth MacDonald left) presents an account that is both personal and a painful metaphor for the unsettling story of America's decline. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the entire Budd plant disappeared from Detroit, symbolizing the death of the American Dream. For working class Americans, the auto industry offered a middle class wage scale that was the key to the door of that Dream. With the piecemeal removal of the plant, the working class hopes vanished along with the factories. Along with the ongoing decline of the former industrial power centers of America, the author raises troubling questions about the future of the United States. With the ending of the Industrial Era, the replacements which include the service and retail economies don't provide the same level of income, benefits, or security found in the auto plants. The author talks to the displaced auto workers, who expressed pride in their jobs and their desire to work hard to build a nation. Those once proud employees are no longer on the assembly lines, but are often in unemployment lines. For Paul Clemens, the American Dream wasn't intended to end that way. As a result, the author asks some painful questions about where middle class income based jobs will come from in the future. For me, the power of the book is how Paul Clemens presents the story of one dismantled auto plant in Detroit, Michigan as a metaphor for the de-industrialization of America and the ending of the American Dream for the working class. The intense pride of the working people of Detroit, and of the United States as a whole, have taken a severe blow in the new harsh reality of globalization. Paul Clemens offers a human story, filled with real people, who felt that reality making an impact on their lives. In a series of pieces of a single plant, is encapsulated the piece by piece dismantling of Industrial America. The lost jobs on the auto assembly lines represent the loss of power of trade unions and working class in late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Industrialization moves across the globe, but the decay, unemployment, and shattered American Dream remain very much at home. This story continues today, as the book is also a prophetic vision of the future for other cities, towns, factories, and working people awaiting their turn for a piece by piece removal of their lives. I highly recommend the insightful and very frightening bookPunching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plantby Paul Clemens, to anyone seeking a real world view inside the dismantling of industrial America. This book will take you to Detroit, to the new location in Mexico, and into the lives of the displaced workers whose stories of loss are still being written. How that story ends is yet to be determined.  |