Hot Topics

Lazarus Consulting Group wants to keep you informed about the latest issues in Organizational Development.

• Taking the Guesswork Out of Effectiveness
  What the heck is an “effective organization”? The means of achieving effectiveness is fairly straightforward and as logical and practical as anything you will ever hear. It does require, however, that you be able to put aside more traditional thinking about what an organization is and how it is supposed to operate and how you are to work within it for a different perspective. Our findings have been that: Effectiveness results when individuals practice the functions of LEADERSHIP, MANAGEMENT, and COLLABORATION and apply these practices to the Vital Elements of the organization – those things that are necessary for its life and health over time.

• Values, Motivation & Performance
  Values are not just important; they are a driving force behind everything that happens in an organization. By "values" we do not mean just the "organizational values" as espoused by formal leaders or those in strategic positions or written in the company handbook. We mean those actually lived out by every member of the organization. In our work at Lazarus, we have come to understand that the values held by individuals and groups across the organization have as much to do with success as good processes or adequate money. We have seen everything from change projects, to IPOs, to team development fall short or fail entirely because of poorly understood or misaligned values.

• What's Wrong with Business and Are You Part of the Problem?
  Something has gone terribly wrong with our economy and with how we think about and practice business - and it didn't just start with September 11 or the business scandals of the past several months. What is wrong now actually started going wrong decades ago. The competitive free enterprise strategies proposed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations work if they are operating within the entire context he proposes. Unfortunately, this is not the context in which businesses operate today. Perhaps it is time to make some adjustments. Perhaps the competitive free enterprise strategies espoused by Adam Smith need to be adjusted to the more collaborative strategies espoused by John Nash.
  

• Organizational Architecture: Work Structure vs. Reporting Structure
  The architecture of an organization involves the power structure, the reporting structure, and the work structure. Too often, WORK structure is confused with REPORTING structure. The REPORTING structure of an organization can refer to the system of ACCOUNTABILITY for performance of the work to a certain standard and for the results of that performance or to the system of COMMUNICATION about the work or both. The WORK structure of an organization refers to the system of RESPONSIBILITY for doing the work and authority for making decisions about the work and the actual FLOW of the work throughout the organization. Work structure and reporting structure must be aligned and closely integrated, though all too often this is not the case. Ideally, the work structure will be determined by the work itself rather than by the reporting structure and will be aligned with other realities about the business.

• Practical Differences in Leadership & Management
  Though we know that leadership and management are not the same and that both are required for a healthy business or organization, we still seem to put much more of our efforts into management than into leadership. Perhaps this is because more of us are "born to manage" than are "born to lead." At Lazarus, however, we have a hunch that this is not the case.

• Impact of the Three Approaches to Adaptation on Organizational Effectiveness (Part 4 of 4-part series)
  Every organization has "an ecology," a combination of the internal environment it creates and the external environment in which it lives. Every organization seeks to be stable, productive, innovative, and adaptable so that it can become a healthy ecological community: one that lives in accordance with its basic nature and in sync with the circumstances in which it operates. The key to becoming and remaining an ecologically healthy organization lies in attending to the "Seven Critical Business Needs."

• Impact of the Three Approaches to Adaptation (Part 3 of 4-part series)
  As we move forward in our discussion, we examine the three approaches to adaptation, their impact on the behaviors of those involved, and when each approach is most successfully used. We also examine the impact that effective and ineffective use of the three approaches has on the overall effectiveness of an organization and on the relative success or failure of a specific effort.

• Lessons in Adaptation: The Hiwassee Event (Part 2 of 4-part series)
  This article presents a story about a short trip down the Hiwassee River and two people's learning first hand about the three approaches to adaptation. It is sure to tickle your funny bone and give you pause for reflection about the ill advised and sometimes disastrous ways most of our organizations approach and implement change efforts.
  Introduction | Story

• Change: Passive, Active, and Proactive Adaptation (Part 1 of 4-part series)
  Organizational change is approached in three basic ways: Passive, Reactive, and Proactive, and in several hybrids of these three. It sounds fairly obvious and pretty straightforward. In reality, however, the approaches to change in organizational settings are anything but simple.

• Military Transformation
  Participate in the ongoing dialog arising from the Strategic Studies Institute Conference held at the US Army War College in April 2001.

• Integrated Planning
  Planning within an organization is not just a matter of making a budget and then giving each area of the organization its "numbers." Planning means taking the vision and the global strategies for reaching it and putting together the plans for actually working the strategies. These plans will include both business and operational planning and will involve several time frames.

• Special Edition: Managerial Malpractice: The Dark Side of Organizational Life
  by John Nirenberg, Ph.D.
  The modern workplace is filled with stress, constant change, rampant conflict and employee disgruntlement. But managers frequently assume it can be remedied with a simple, even obvious, quick fix that will make everything all right. But this assumes management can and will apply appropriate solutions to problems they themselves might or might not create. And the assumption that management can do this, that they are indeed the source of the solution and not the problem, is the first mistake.

• Oh No! It's Strategic Planning Time!
  For many organizations it's that time of year again. Time to take last year's Strategic Plan from the shelf, dust it off, determine how much progress was made, and update the strategies or make a new one. Now is the reckoning, the time when we realize just how little of last year's plan we actually accomplished. We wonder one more time how it is that we could invest such energy in making plans that never materialize.

• The Missing Link: How Business Week Missed
  The August 28th edition of Business Week Magazine contained a special section on "the corporation of the 21st century." While we agreed with much of the information presented, we did not feel that the articles went far enough. Indeed, we felt that all of the articles were missing one very important point: that the nature of business itself must change.

• Rebirth and Renewal
  On November 3-5, 2000, Lazarus Consulting Group, Inc. presented the workshop "Functional Leadership: A Model for the 21st Century" to the 2nd Annual Conference of the International Leadership Association in Toronto, Ontario. This Hot Topic is the introduction to that workshop.
• Challenging Our Assumptions About Business
  On September 23, 2000, Lazarus Consulting Group, Inc. presented the seminar "Challenging Our Assumptions About Business" to the alumni of the University of Tennessee School of Architecture, who were celebrating Homecoming and the 35th anniversary of the School of Architecture. The seminar discussed:
  1) the emerging creative economy
  2) the challenges this economy presents for organizations of all kinds
  3) what it will take to be a successful business in the 21st Century