Leading Through Ideas: A Practical Framework

MOST US CORPORATE INITIATIVES FAIL!

A recent survey of over 50 senior executives, most with decades of leadership experience in US-based corporations, revealed the following shocking opinions:

• Less than one-third of corporate initiatives had a significant impact lasting more than 18 months.
• Most employees had no understanding of the business purpose of these corporate initiatives.
• Only a small minority of employees knew what was expected of them to carry out the initiatives.
• Very few employees were committed to the corporate initiatives.

More shocking is that very few of the executives who reviewed these findings were surprised by them. It appears to be the norm that corporate initiatives, often begun with huge investments and lots of fanfare, simply don’t work.

John Eggert’s book, Leading Through Ideas, provides a practical framework for analyzing and assessing the risks to the successful implementation of corporate initiatives and other ideas in the corporate context. More important, the book provides practical, common-sense approaches to mitigate these risks.

The last two chapters extend the key concepts beyond ideas promoted by organizational initiatives to the idea of “The-Organization-You-Lead” and the idea of “You-as-Leader.” Eggert has been researching these issues for over 25 years, initially with in-depth interviews of senior executives and then by testing his findings against his clients’ actual business problems. Finally, in preparation for publication of the book, he convened an expert review panel of 63 executives to challenge and test the results of his long-term investigation through a series of surveys, a symposium and other interactions.

John Eggert received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1973, with an emphasis on measurement and statistics in social science research. Since then, his professional focus has been on "what makes ideas work." This issue arose early in his career as he worked with public sector clients including the National Science Foundation and the Centers for Disease Control-he noticed that there was rarely a lack of good ideas in these organizations, but there was often a lack of execution and impact.

Eggert then turned his attention to the business sector, establishing his own consulting firm with a client base including General Motors, CitiBank, Motorola, Hewlett/Packard, McDonald's and Arthur Andersen. Again, he observed excellent ideas getting stuck, wasting resources and having limited impact.

Since moving to Houston, in 2005, Eggert has focused his executive coaching business primarily on technology-oriented professionals from energy sector companies such as British Petroleum, National Oilwell Varco and Transocean.

Eggert's current coaching, consulting and speaking work focuses on helping executives and their teams, as well as high potential managers, understand how they can ensure the ideas of themselves, their organizations and their initiatives impact those they most need to influence.