Customer Reviews

Rapid Results!: How 100-Day Projects Build the Capacity for Large-Scale Change

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Authors and consultants Robert H. Schaffer and Ronald N. Ashkenas address their book to leaders who face the challenge of making rapid changes in their organizations - especially to those who know they need to move performance to a higher level, yet are too impatient to execute large-scale change. Schaffer and Ashkenas flatly deny that you need to make any trade-off between short-term gains and long-range organizational capabilities. They offer advice about such changes as new information systems, research and development, product innovation, mergers and acquisitions, and even the use of rapid-results projects in developing countries. Essentially, they take a step-by-step approach to building your organization's ability to achieve short-term change with long-term impact. Despite the authors' occasional self-promotional moments, we find that they offer solid, worthwhile information for CEOs, project managers and other executives.

With relevant examples, the authors lay out a reasoned argument asserting that big fix, multi-year change initiatives (think, ObamaCare)don't work. Why? Because every organization is wired together by thousands, if not tens of thousands, of micro-connections that are not visible to the initiators of big-fix projects. When a big-fix, top-down, change/improvement initiative is launched, these micro-connections are disturbed and unintended consequences begin to occur -- consequences that the big-fix initiators are ill-prepared to manage -- so the initiative fails. Failure results from the inability to execute in the face of the multiple disconnects of the unseen micro-connections. If you saw Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer's apprentice in Fantasia contending with the multiple water-carrying brooms, you get the picture.

The solution? Forget big-fix, long cycle projects. Instead, launch one or more 100-day fast response projects, some of which run concurrently, whose purpose is to attempt to achieve something that can be done in 100 days (that eliminates a lot of projects!)and, taking on an experimental mindset, succeed fail, fail fast, but above all, learn fast. Among other things, a learning organization learns to implement and develops leaders, both present and future, who have cut their teeth on executing successfully. Because a 100-day project works in such a small organizational area, it will likely detect the micro-connections it disrupts and develop sensible work-arounds -- something the big-fix architects and managers don't have the capacity to do in their multi-year big change transformations.

I recommend as companion reading the HBR article "Why Good Projects Fail Anyway", which can be purchased online, and the book The Lessons of Experience,Lessons of Experience : How Successful Executives Develop on the Jobwhich tells how managers learned to execute when given almost impossible tasks.

Robert Schaffer forever changed management consulting for the better, with his first book Break-Through Strategy Breakthrough Strategytwo decades ago. Now with his colleague Ron Ashkenas he continues teaching the next generation of 21st century consultants how to best engineer Large-Scale Change. Consultants who have earned their spurs in one of the big buzz-word bee-hive consulting firms Das Boston Consulting Group Strategie-Buch. Die wichtigsten Managementkonzepte für den Praktiker. may be surprised to learn that 'small is better' when it comes to getting rapid results in a flow of low-risk '100-Day Projects', without becoming submerged in a swamp of super-size, spreadsheet Sigma-Six Stats.

If the truth be told, '100-Day Action Projects' are taught by Blanckenberg & Blanckenberg at One Big Idea Consulting Limited NZ for managers to apply at home Break 100 Now: From Hacker to Golfer in Just 90 Days as well as in the office The New Leaders 100-Day Action Plan: How to Take Charge, Build Your Team, and Get Immediate Results .... more as a way of life and not just an on-the-job management tool.

However, no other consultant teaches it better than Robert Schaffer in RHS&A Consulting Master Classes and in this state-of-the-art book.

The more you believe you know about '100-Day Action Projects' you more you learn from a Magister Ludi Magister Ludi like Schaffer and his colleagues.

The folks at RHS&A have done a great job outlining the power of rapid results -- and how this approach can make a major impact on any organization. Filled with good examples as well as with helpful approaches to different challenges (mergers, turnarounds, growth, performance improvement).