Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources [Hardcover]

James L. Ritchie-Dunham (Author), Hal T. Rabbino (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0471497312 | ISBN-13: 978-0471497318 | Publication Date: September 12, 2001 | Edition: 1

'Most organizations can't execute strategy. Complexity is their enemy. Managing from Clarity provides a roadmap for introducing systems thinking to your organization. Read it; it's a snapshot of how strategy will be managed in the 21st Century.'
David P. Norton, President, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, co-author of the best-selling The Balanced Scorecard and The Strategy-Focused Organization
'If you're not a systems thinker, you're not a good business leader. A few born leaders do it through intuition. For all the rest, there's Managing from Clarity. The book will spell out for you how to build your strategic agenda and how to align your leadership team around it.'
Francis Gouillart, CEO, Emergence Consulting, co-author of the best-selling Transforming the Organization
'this book [turns] the art of system dynamics interventions into science for the first time. For those of us who live the successes and the frustrations of organizations every day, this is a gift.'
Jorge Rufat-Latre, Director, Strategos
'a powerful set of ideas and frameworks for anyone with strategic responsibility.'
Kim Warren, Teaching Fellow, Strategic & International Management, London Business School, author of Competitive Strategy Dynamics
'Finally, someone has harnessed the power of System Dynamics and crafted it into a useful tool for strategy development and strategic management . . . [this book] demonstrates the potential insight that can come from systems thinking and its power to align an organization around a single view of the business model and strategic direction.'
Michael J. Puleo, Director, Deloitte Consulting
'combine[s] the conceptual insights from the academic literature with the savvy of consultants to provide a sound approach to managing any organization.'
James S. Dyer, The Fondren Centennial Chair in Business, University of Texas at Austin
'an intelligent and vivid introduction to an extremely powerful set of concepts and tools for strategy development.'
Andreas Koch, Principal, L.E.K. Consulting

Editorial Reviews

Review

"…full of useful ideas well argued and well presented…" (Long Range Planning)

From the Publisher

Reviews

Finally, someone has harnessed the power of System Dynamics and crafted it into a useful tool for strategy development and strategic management. Jim and Hal's GRASP methodology provides an accessible framework for designing the inputs and understanding the outputs of System Dynamics. Managing from Clarity clearly demonstrates the potential insight that can come from systems thinking and its power to align an organization around a single view of the business model and strategic direction. (Michael J. Puleo, Director, Deloitte Consulting)

Business interactions and outcomes these days are far too complex to be understood, much less managed, in terms of traditional strategic thinking tools. The Managing from Clarity process enables business leaders to "get their mind around" the dynamic, multi-faceted system that IS their enterprise. This way of thinking has enabled me and my leadership team to better understand our business, clearly define our interdependencies, and, from this place of greater clarity, identify those few, critical "leverage points" from among the host of options on the table. Bottom-line, managing from clarity has enabled us to make better-informed resource allocation decisions. (Dan Farell, President, Distribution, TXU Electric & Gas)

The concepts and methods in Managing from Clarity address four critical challenges that futurists commonly face: characterizing complex issues (systems), building common understanding, providing insight into leverage points for taking action to move the system, and suggesting likely alternative futures. The insights gained frequently stimulate breakthrough thinking and empower action. While we will never totally take mystery out of the future, Managing from Clarity can help a great deal in reducing the unknown! (Jay Forrest, Futurist, Pteragenesis)

Over the last few decades, antibiotic resistance has emerged as a public health issue. Although everyone believes that use and resistance are correlated, the real how and why of the correlation is a bit of a "black box." Using the Managing from Clarity process has revealed some surprising interactions (leverage points), and confirmed the value of surveillance data. (Kate Hendricks, MD, MPH&TM, Board Certified Preventive Medicine, Texas)

Strategy is a dynamic process and as such requires dynamic tools. In its ability to model dynamic systems be they a business, a strategy, or a plague 'System Dynamics' is moving to center stage as an indispensable tool for enabling strategists and decision makers to manage from clarity. It is as central to the strategist's 'toolkit' as Excel is to a financial analyst or the genetic code is to a biochemist. Ritchie-Dunham and Rabbino describe their subject matter as Managing from Clarity. Their extraordinary contribution uses multiple practical examples, case studies, analogies, and a logical conceptual thread to enable the reader to learn with clarity. Congratulations on a fine treatment of a difficult subject. (Hans-Peter von Sicard, Executive Vice President, Emergence Consulting, former VP of Practice Development in Renaissance)

The Managing from Clarity process structured our thinking about how the critical pieces of our organization connect. It also helped us identify where were the key strategic resources and leverage points for our firm, and what we could realistically achieve, with regards to the complex and dynamic challenges our bank was facing at the time. The process and tools provided us a practical and effective way to get our group and its goals aligned around what really matters for our organization as a whole. This clarity allowed us to focus our energy as a management team around the problem itself and it strengthened our ability and enthusiasm to work together. Most importantly, we will never see our world as we did before. (Elizabeth Martinez, Senior Vice President, Department of Structured Finance, Banco Nacional de Mexico)

En mi opinion una de las razones que otorgan valor de la metodologia GRASP, radica en que esta se concentra en "el grupo de liderazgo," en como este puede determinar el rumbo y como refuerza la comunicacion y el conocimiento interno de todas las areas. Se aprende a tratar la organizacion de manera total, tomando en cuenta el ambiente externo y su relacion con todas las piezas internas "deptos, gerencias etc.," aun cuando estas no sean mi responsabilidad directa. Fue muy interesante tener a SAPAL en blanco y negro en una hoja. Es una optica diferente del negocio que ayuda a reafirmar, o definir, el curso actual y futuro de la organizacion. Se encuentran consecuencias esperadas o aun mejor las inesperadas. Fue una experiencia positiva y gratificante desde el aspecto humano, tecnologico y organizacional. (Ernesto Enei, Gerente de Geo-Informatica, SAPAL (Sistema de Agua Potable y Alcantarillado de Leon)

Decision-making in our project-framing workshop was made clearer by considering strategic and non-technical issues. This allowed individuals of the multifunctional team to GRASP the process with a focused understanding, rather than only being activity driven. (T.H.van der Harst, organizer, project framing workshop, Shell International Exploration and Production)

In today's fast past, complex working environment, managers and leaders are constantly searching for means and road-tested intuitive tools that help them lead their organizations successfully. In this book, the authors provide these means through their tested concept "Managing From Clarity". This concept provides leaders with the ability to understand the dynamics that relate the business to their organization, communicate these understanding, and move the organization to different directions ensuring continued success. I had the opportunity to see the authors implementing some of their concepts and providing this clear added value to management. It is great that now these concepts and methodologies can be communicated, used and implemented through this new book. (Emad A. Elrafie, Ph.D., Executive Manager - Delta R)

To create value in the commodity metals industry, it is imperative that management create and recognize opportunities, appreciating the requirements of the stakeholders and pursuing them vigorously. It becomes really necessary to have a shared understanding of the contextual framework, based on systems thinking and the resource-based view. Managing for Clarity should be read by all managers involved in strategic planning. It makes my life easier. (Arturo Vaca, Director of Strategic Planning, Servicios Industriales Penoles)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 275 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (September 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471497312
• ISBN-13: 978-0471497318
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #988,234 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good for complex issues, May 28, 2002

By 

Steven J Waddell (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources (Hardcover)

People working with large complex systems can often become lost in the large number of variables in their working environment. It is easy to be swayed by the ones that happen to be most appealing personally or most visible, rather than by the ones that present the highest leverage point based upon a good analysis connecting goals, resources, structures, actions and people. For someone like me working to develop global systems that aspire for fundamental societal change, this is a continual danger. The methodologies presented in Managing from Clarity are powerful tools to avoid this danger and ensure that actions are tied to points of high strategic leverage.
- Steve Waddell - PhD, MBA
Director - The Collaboration Works

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Insightful, practical and readable - I want more clarity!!, January 29, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources (Hardcover)

Managing from Clarity is well thought out and clear application of how to apply systems thinking to real organizational issues. I want to know more about how to introduce this way of thinking into my company...I am sure this is the way for our team to improve its communication as well as its performance. Thank you for putting this out there!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good integration of strategic and systemic tools, January 5, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Managing from Clarity: Identifying, Aligning and Leveraging Strategic Resources (Hardcover)

If you look at the authors' websites, as I was prompted to do by one reader's comments, many of the endorsements came from people who used the authors' method on projects and continued to affiliate and support his work. I take that as a good sign. It is common practice to have endorsements from people you know amongst others. The book goes beyond system dynamics, integrating it with tools from strategy and decision making to provide a more complete understanding of the organization. Some chapters are easier to read than others, but the gems of the next level of strategic thinking are there.