In this seminar, we will teach you the benefit of, and the methods to identify executive intent.

You will leave this seminar with the underestanding of how not only does culture trump everything in business behavior, but how you can mold the behavior of an entire organization, from top to bottom, resulting in massive shifts in culture, in a very short time frame.

Having everyone on the same page in making decisions, derives tremendous benefit to your operation and the bottom line performance, both in radical increases in efficiency, but also in freeing up huge opportunities in innovation through a supporting culture.

The key process elements are as follows:

• Identify statements of "values"... not benefits, but reasons for why you do what you do, stated in terms of a behavior.

This is not as easy as it sounds, as getting the right level of granularity that reflects actionable terminology - rather than "motherhood and apple pie" - is a learned artform. Usually extracted from press releases, corporate memos, annual reports, and other correspondence, these provide a mosaic of behavioral values articulated.

• Allocating these values into catagorical classifications, so that they can be aggregated together.

We use Quality Function Deployment (QFD) as a classification framework, where voice of the business, voice of the employee, and voice of the customer, are the top level categorizations. In addition, these voices break down into at least one level of granularity below that.

• Aggregate these classified values together, to ascertain the essense of what those values are attempting to articulate. 

This comes down to a one line statement that everyone can get behind, in each of the topical areas.

• Break this top level value down into implications and correlaries to those implications.

Typically for business and for information technology, there are 2 subgroups.

• Implications - short definitions of what this top level value statement means for behavioral options for a given
• Correlaries - both individual and collective aspects of the implications - a finer level of detail, with more detail on the inter-related impacts of the various implications.

As a parallel effort, we will create "logical tiers", which is a taxonomy of corporate structure that allows for the allocation of prioritized values to these tiers.

All values are applicable to all situations, but in any decision tradeoff, there is a logical priority of these values, as otherwise, they would be in conflict. The tier structure provides a uniform breakdown of the enterprise environment into logical spaces where value prioritization is uniform. It does NOT reflect organizational structure, reporting, geographic, etc., but is a behaviorally synergistic grouping of logical areas where common characteristics exist uniformly.

Prioritization of values is also necessary, as values can be in conflict, where say, the implications and correlaries of a business voice, cost, might be in conflict with a customer voice. Without this prioritization, you end up with what I coin the "Bible Apprach" where the decision maker can pick chapter and verse to support whatever decision is desired.

What you end up with is a framework for supporting consistent decision making, aligned with executive intent.

This brings a number of improvements to bare.

1. Decisions are made in a consistent fashion.
2. People discover that their decisions are broadly supported and seldom overridden in further review. They become engaged and empowered, creating higher productivity
3. Governance committees become a thing of the past

And the big benefit; you see massive cultural shifts occur in business performance, as everyone is now on the same page.

These cultural shifts and consistent decision making, provides radical improvements in bottom line corporate performance.