Building a winning strategy begins with recognizing that strategy is too important to be delegated to a strategy department. It can certainly be valuable to have the help of strategy officers or teams on refining and implementing strategy, but the strategy itself needs to be conceived and owned by the CEO (or equivalent for a division). Otherwise, strategy often becomes a diffuse product of group thinking and compromises among multiple stakeholders in the organization.
Too many people believe that to achieve great things we must make brutal sacrifices, that to succeed in work we must focus single-mindedly, at the expense of everything else in life. Even those who reject the idea of a zero-sum game fall prey to a kind of binary thinking revealed by the term we use to describe the ideal lifestyle: “work/life balance.” The idea that “work” competes with “life” ignores that “life” is actually the intersection and interaction of four major domains: work, home, community, and the private self.
I start my mornings with a run around Central Park in New York City. Over the last 18 months, it’s become more like dodging the cyclists as I make my way around the loop than going for a relaxing jog. Cursing, flipping the bird – even a near miss – are regular occurrences as these two groups of athletes try to get their daily workout. I’ve even seen a cyclist spit on a runner. How could so many cyclists be so angry? Wanting to understand, last Saturday I borrowed a friend’s bicycle, strapped on his cycling shoes, and clipped into the pedals. I entered the park on West 77th Street, where a steep ramp descends into the 6-mile loop. I quickly accelerated down it and had to merge onto a roadway packed with runners and pedestrians who weren’t paying attention to me. As my bicycle picked up speed and I tried to enter the loop, I realized I was in danger — and so were the runners in my path. That’s when I shouted, “HEADS UP!”
NHS Improving Quality will launch a pioneering project this autumn that pairs highly-rated cancer trusts with trusts that have potential to improve in a bid to reduce national variation in patients’ experience of care and raise overall standards.
The support package is a response to the results of the latest Cancer Patient Experience Survey (CPES), which were released last week. The survey, which is carried out by Quality Health on behalf of NHS England, reflects the views of more than 70,000 patients and identifies those trusts with the highest ratings, as well as those that need to make improvements.
The ‘buddying’ programme will involve up to 12 trusts and aims to enable the ‘most improved’ trusts to share best practice and accelerate the adoption and spread of new ways of working.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a popular and often-used technique that helps people answer the question of why the problem occurred in the first place.
Root Cause Analysis seeks to identify the origin of a problem. It uses a specific set of steps, with associated tools, to find the primary cause of the problem, so that you can:
Determine what happened.
Determine why it happened.
Figure out what to do to reduce the likelihood that it will happen again.
In this article, we’ll look at the steps you can take to successfully schedule, thereby making time for the work that really matters, while still leaving time for personal development, family and friends.
We’re all a little bit crazy — and at some point, most managers have certainly felt that way about their subordinates. But maybe you’re the one driving them nuts. Are you presenting them with a “double bind”—that is, asking them to behave simultaneously in contradictory ways? Organizations today routinely tell people to “Be empowered and innovative. Take risks;” while demanding at the same time “Make plan, and deliver on all your commitments.” If you think this drives people crazy, you’re right. So what can you do to help keep your people sane?
The Intelligence Handbook aims to guide users through the process of finding, filtering and understanding what is learnt from secondary sources, to get the most value from this activity. Intelligence gathering in a systematic way will ensure a robust evidence base is achieved for programmes and projects, no matter what the specific area of interest is.
The Learning Handbook aims to guide users through the process of learning before, during and after programme and project activities in a systematic way, to get the most value from this activity.In order to continuously improve as an individual, team or organisation, capturing and sharing learning in an effective way to turn it into actionable knowledge is a critical success factor.
Contracting out public services in the UK is now well established. Nevertheless it is still a deeply divisive issue and the debate about outsourcing tends to generate more heat than light. How it
affects employees is little researched. This report, commissioned by UNISON, seeks to help bridge that
information gap by profiling and evaluating in some detail the impact of contracting out on employee pay, terms and conditions in five case-study contracts. It finds the most salient consequence of outsourcing is not to drive up quality but to drive down wages.