As
managers, senior executives, and CEOs all over have painfully
discovered, if you don’t manage for the short term, you won’t be around
for the long term. Bestselling business author Chuck Martin found that
nothing consumes business managers more than how to manage a company in
the weeks and months immediately ahead.
As founder of NFI Research,
an executive think tank made up of some 3,000 high-level executives at
over 1,400 companies, Chuck Martin has interviewed and gathered the
results of thousands of management specialists the world over to
discover how companies are successfully zeroing in on improving
short-term performance, while still balancing these efforts with
long-term strategic goals. By looking to managers and executives at
companies like IBM, SAP, Deloitte & Touche, Kraft, AT&T, Dow
Chemical, and hundreds of others, Martin has uncovered the “best
practices” that help propel short-term performance. Among them:
•Bridging
the enormous disconnect between management’s strategic goals and the
ability of front-line managers and employees to implement these goals
•Moving even the biggest projects forward incrementally, delivering tangible results at each step along the way
•Putting together time-based and events-based teams that can focus specifically on essential short-term decisions and goals
•Creating incentives to reward short-term results
What
Chuck Martin has found is that companies that adopt practices designed
to achieve short-term results are usually better positioned to achieve
their long-term strategies as well.
A critically important management book that addresses one of the overriding concerns of businesses today, Managing for the Short Term is an essential addition to any manager’s toolkit.
"Managing
for the short term is not simply about moving faster. It is about
moving smarter. It is about effective implementation and operation
within the context of mission and vision. Strategy is implemented
through a series of small steps and rapid, short-term decisions within
that long-term view. It forces managers to become more effective at
achieving the measurable results required by today's climate."
From Managing For the Short Term
