Value and Strategy: Competing Successfully in the Nineties

Value and Strategy: Competing Successfully in the Nineties 

By Michael H. Shenkman

presents fresh ideas, concepts, and practical suggestions for decision makers who must sustain growth and profitability in today's competitive business environment. Clearly written and illustrated with examples, graphics, and a glossary, this compact volume propels the idea of customer value to the forefront of business strategy. Value has emerged as a key idea in strategy because, as never before, customers can from pick and choose from among many different products and services. As a result, their expectations and demands for value, including quality, innovation, and affordability, have reached new heights. Shenkman thus begins by showing how a valuing process is used in everyday life: how a buyer thinks about value; how the idea of value operates in the processes of buying and selling; and how value and profits are created in the course of a relationship between a business and its customers. Dr. Shenkman then shows how in today's markets businesses both compete and cooperate in order to establish a leading position for their products and services. These efforts are necessary to ensure profitability, but they also combine to create powerful forces that limit the viability of any product or service over time. Market forces thus fuel the phenomenon of "turnover" that requires constant innovation and organizational responsiveness. Value and Strategy outlines practical steps managers can take to ensure their organization's success. It helps decision makers see more clearly into the dynamic and ambiguous situations that arise each day as a result of relentless market pressures. It provides new insights that help tofoster meaningful organizational change, while ensuring that employees have a personal stake in the business's profitability. Shenkman believes that work can play a constructive and creative role in people's lives. Using the strategy presented in this volume, managers can create the organizational conditions in which people can work together to innovate, solve problems, and create new opportunities for the business.

The Strategic Heart 

by Michael H. Shenkman Ph.D.

Uses insights from the new sciences of complexity and flow to help business leaders create adaptable, high-performance organizations. Part I introduces some of the central themes of the science of complex systems and shows their relevance to business, demonstrating how to marshal people's talents around values and specific actions.

 Part II presents work showing that when people are fully engaged in their experience, they enjoy learning, an experience called Flow, and tells how to create opportunities for Flow. For managers at all levels.When people focus on a mission they believe is important and are guided by values they believe in, they put their hearts into making their work and company a success. Using the new science of Complexity and actual case histories, The Strategic Heart offers managers the keys to leading the high-performance and flexible organizations that create today's most successful companies.

The Arch and The Path

The Arch and The Path

The Life of Leading Greatly

Michael H. Shenkman, Ph.D.

The book envisions the unfolding of the story by which people who are leaders become great leaders. The story has four parts. Each of these parts constitutes a learning moment, an occasion for pausing and reflecting, as we journey on the path to great leading. During these moments, we check in with Beth and reflect on the experience that is bringing her to a point of needing new realizations. Then we discuss what those realizations spark in terms of new insights and new openings into the practices that enable great leading to take shape. At each of these pauses on the path we find a marker that helps us sort out what is occurring for Beth at this time and place. The markers take the form of the arches. The components of each of the arches remains the same – four spires and a keystone – but at each point in the journey, what those components represent evolves. They have to evolve because each of these occasions makes an occasion during which the leader realizes new dimensions of herself and of the endeavor. The lessons learned at the previous arches are retained, and are actually expanded and enriched. Thus at any point in the journey, the leader is learning at most five (not 140) lessons. After the third arch, we might imagine, the leader can venture forth with no need of any learning device, any “arch,” at all.

Leader Mentoring

Leader Mentoring
Find, Inspire, and Cultivate Great Leaders
Michael Shenkman, Ph.D. N

Now available from Amazon.com - click here to purchase! Mentoring differs from instruction, teaching, and coaching in that it emphasizes not talents and skills used in executing a project, but the qualities and values of life that are needed to sustain oneself in the creative endeavor. 

In LeaderMentoring, Shenkman makes the case for leader mentoring. “No mentors, no leaders,” he says. Yet, this great,ancient, and necessary catalyst for learning has been neglected by our training and development industry. Leader Mentoring comprises a qualitatively different service than does coaching. For any executive who wants to succeed, coaching hasproven its worth. But mentoring touches something else: how managers can shape their lives so that they can step into larger challenges and risks to accomplish something greater than they ever have before.Shenkman delves into the true significance of mentoring. This edgy book introduces new concepts by asking readers to open their hearts and minds and think differently. It reaches for the true history, tradition, and spirit that motivates mentoring. Throughout the book, Shenkman’s colleagues and clients tell their stories about their own mentoring experiences. “Mentoring has changed everything in my life,” says one.