Fit for the Future

Building an organization that is daring, adaptable, innovative, and engaging as the times demand requires a large cadre of inspired management innovators—individuals who can envision and prototype bold new alternatives to the management status quo. This is the goal of Fit for the Future, a 1 or 2-day experience that helps participants gain the necessary perspectives, skills and tools to first imagine and then design innovative approaches to creating strategy, allocating resources, harnessing talent, evaluating performance, building teams, and exercising control.

We'll explore four critical steps for turning “ordinary” managers into inspired mavericks: 

1

Challenge Dogma

Organizations follow familiar patterns, and these shape our assumptions about what's possible. Along the way we've inherited all sorts of management beliefs that constrain our thinking. Most managers believe, for example, that freedom and discipline are mutually exclusive, that control must be exercised from above, that people will reflexively resist change, and that first-level associates are incapable of self-management.

In Fit for the Future, we guide leaders to question core assumptions: Must control flow from above? Are freedom and discipline truly at odds? Can frontline workers make strategic decisions?

2

Learn from the Fringe

The future—of art, music, fashion and management—is born on the fringe. That's why you won't uncover the future of management by benchmarking your Fortune 500 peers. In Fit for the Future, we introduce participants to pioneering companies that have broken free from traditional management models.

On the fringe, one finds organizations where employees chose their leaders, where formal hierarchy has been abolished, where employees select what to work on, and where strategy is the result of an open, always-on, and company-wide conversation. By exploring these bleeding edge practices, one learns bureaucracy isn't inevitable, and that you can build an organization of scale that is lithe, nimble and endlessly inventive.

3

Prototype

Top-down task forces won't transform management. Traditional approaches to improving management practices are too slow and incremental. What's needed is a broad portfolio of bold, yet low-risk, management experiments. Companies regularly experiment with new products, web designs, and ad campaigns, so why not experiment with new management techniques?

In Fit for the Future, we will show you how to design low-cost, time-compressed management experiments—and how to scale positive lessons across the organization.

4

Make it Personal

Transforming organizations demands new mindsets, especially from those in power. Leadership must become less a function of one's position, and more an expression of one's ability to catalyze positive change: unleashing entrepreneurial energy, nurturing colleagues, building community, challenging dogma for the sake of collective accomplishment.

In Fit for the Future, we will provide participants with practical steps to surface and challenge self-limiting, bureaucratic beliefs and multiply the leadership capacity of their teams.

The companies that win in the tumultuous times ahead will be the ones that evolve their management practices faster than their competitors—and Fit for the Future, you will learn how to do just that. The ultimate goal: an organization that is bold, resilient, creative, and brimming with passion.

Ready to accelerate your organization's evolution? To learn more about bringing Fit for the Future to your company, please use the contact form below.