Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

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

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.