Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility - Softcover

Pixton, Pollyanna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0321572882 ISBN 13: 9780321572882

Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional, 2009

Synopsis

Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility

 

Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage.

 

You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources–and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results.

 

Coverage includes

• Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects
• Reducing resistance to process improvements
• Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects
• Identifying the tasks that don’t create enough value to be worth your time
• Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation
• Mitigating project risks more effectively–especially those associated with complexity and uncertainty
• Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace
• Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress

About this title

About the Author

Pollyanna Pixton is an internationally recognized expert on collaborative leadership who has worked and consulted with companies and organizations for thirty-eight years. She is president of Evolutionary Systems and director of the Institute of Collaborative Leadership.

 

Niel Nickolaisen is CIO and director of strategic planning at Headwaters, Inc.

 

Todd Little has held a number of senior leadership positions including director of software and technology at Landmark Graphics, a subsidiary of Halliburton. For more than thirty years he has developed–and led teams developing–commercial software applications, primarily for oil and gas exploration and production.

 

Kent McDonald has nearly fifteen years of experience as a project and program manager in industries ranging from automotive to financial services.

 

Pixton, Nickolaisen, Little, and McDonald are all partners at Accelinnova.

Review

“In Stand Back and Deliver, the authors provide strong, practical guidance on how to leverage the strengths of your entire team to get the right job done. Their experience in the trenches shines through with clear examples of how their approach can be applied to make your projects successful, regardless of the domain.”

–Jim Brosseau, author of Software Teamwork: Taking Ownership for Success

 

“A book rich with content, practical tools that can be easily adopted, and great examples that relate to the common workplace!”

–Lisa Shoop, software director at Sabre Holdings

 

“For those new to project management, Stand Back and Deliver offers the voice of experience. Its message is clear: Understand the value you must deliver, understand and manage the project’s complexity, trust in your people, and above all, have the courage to do the right thing.”

–Patrick Bailey, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, Calvin College

 

“With most business books I am happy if I learn one or two key things that I want to put to use. This book is full of such concepts and tools and provides enough detail and examples that I’m confident I’d not just want to use them but would be able to do so successfully.”

–Terri Pitcher, IT manager

 

“Today’s postmodern organizational environment requires a new approach, and this book will provide many insights to the reader. You will learn how to detach and stand back, and yet passionately engage and deliver.”

–Greg Githens, managing partner at Catalyst Management Consulting, LLC

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0321572882
• ISBN 13: 9780321572882
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 186