Craig Hickman

An updated and more modern edition of Partners In Leadership's classic guide to personal and organizational accountability. The Oz Principle has sold more than a million copies since it debuted in 1994, and it has become the worldwide bible on accountability. By embracing its practical and invaluable advice, tens of thousands of companies have improved their personal and organizational accountability -- the key to achieving and sustaining exceptional results. When people take personal ownership of their organization's priorities and accept responsibility for their own performance, they become more invested and work at a higher level -- to ensure not only their own success, but everyone's. Now fully updated and simplified, with all new stories and advice tailored to today's readers, this Next Generation Edition is a must-have for any team that wants to improve its results.

Praise for an innovator s tale "An Innovator s Tale weaves a suspenseful story while communicating the nine I s of Innovation that all organizations need to achieve creative breakthroughs in today s world. You won t be able to put this down until you ve finished it!" —Ken Blanchard, Coauthor of The One Minute Manager. "What a great combination an absorbing and thoroughly entertaining story, combined with a thought-provoking approach to stimulate and drive innovation in an organization. I read it in one sitting, and began applying the innovative principles immediately within our company." —Mark Hoffman, President & CEO, North America, Corporate Express, A Buhrmann Company "A fun and engaging way to explore concepts of strategy and innovation...an easy yet thorough summary of different approaches to breaking out of old patterns of thinking in organizations. Hickman has found a way to make these concepts easily accessible to a broad audience." —Paul McKinnon, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Dell Computer Corporation "At last, a business book you can take to the beach...and a suspense thriller you can feel good about your employees reading at work. The leadership lessons on how to create a context for people to achieve accelerated solutions and extraordinary results are provocative and powerful." —Joseph A. Cannon, Chairman of the Board, Geneva Steel "The perfect primer for your next strategy retreat or innovation forum...a great read!" —Fiona C. Laird, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Unilever Bestfoods North America

Using the analogy of the Wizard of Oz, this work shows how companies can benefit from the culture of accountability, detailing the principles behind this change. It offers strategies to strip away the trappings of current management programmes and fads.

The Fourth Dimension The Next Level of Personal and Organizational Achievement As the latest wave of corporate downsizing, streamlining, and reengineering initiatives continues to mount in intensity, the traditional employer-employee relationship is experiencing a massive shakeup, and a new work paradigm is struggling to be born. At the same time that employers are finding that they can no longer offer the traditional carrots of job security and lavish compensation packages, they are coming to recognize the need to forge closer partnerships with their employees-partnerships defined by shared risks, responsibilities, and rewards. But a paradigm shift of this magnitude cannot occur without considerable effort on the parts of both employers and employees. Such a successful fusion of personal and organizational visions requires a radical change in attitudes, expectations, and work patterns, and those who are quickest to make those changes are sure to be the big winners in the years ahead. The Fourth Dimension provides a comprehensive program for managers challenged to do more with less and individuals seeking to improve the quality of their worklives. It offers proven techniques to help you excel in the three primary work dimensions outlined in the authors' acclaimed MetaWork System(TM): * PowerWork(TM): efficiency, effectiveness, and the achievement of the right results * NetWork(TM): sharing competence and knowledge with others and developing more dynamic working relationships * ValueWork(TM): achieving more frequent breakthroughs in performance and value added based on individual and group ideas You'll learn how to integrate these three primary dimensions into an incredibly potent Fourth Dimension, a newly defined workspace within which individuals, teams, and entire companies continually exceed their best hopes and expectations. Throughout The Fourth Dimension, the authors provide vivid real-life illustrations of the astonishing results that have been achieved with the techniques they describe. Personal profiles of leaders such as Rebecca Matthias of Mothers Work and Steve Wiggins of Oxford Health Plans, as well as case studies of top companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, and Microsoft, lead you to a fuller understanding of the revolutionary changes now reshaping the work world and how many of today's business leaders have learned to use fourth dimensional thinking to gain the competitive edge. Offering a complete program for achieving higher levels of performance by combining personal and organizational vision, The Fourth Dimension is must reading for executives, managers, team leaders, entrepreneurs, and virtually anyone interested in achieving a more fulfilling and meaningful destiny in the postindustrial work world.

This work on business strategy centres around the task given to the reader to revitalize MedTech, a troubled $150 million company, within five years. The reader is challenged, chapter by chapter, to hammer out the tough sequence of choices that a chief executive must make. The fictional result is the life or death of MedTech; the real-world result is an interactive business adventure that turns managers and employees at all levels into better strategists and decision-makers. The fun of the game lies in its "what if" approach, with each option branching into a myriad of instructive paths. For example, at the end of Chapter One, readers must make their first critical decision: should MedTech focus on developing new products or should it spend more to market and sell existing products? The company's key managers are bitterly divided in their opinions, but like real CEOs, the reader must decide - and face new consequences that demand further analysis and action. In the end, there are 33 different endings ranging from triumph to disaster. Readers can "play" the book again and again to explore the outcomes of different strategic choices. On one level, "The Strategy Game" is a suspenseful thriller with the reader as the main character. On another level, it teaches fundamental and sophisticated truths about business - from competitors' moves and industry changes to leading-edge practices and management styles, to customer demands and product breakthroughs.

The best business managers and leaders often have an adversarial relationship with each other, yet they have one thing in common: the search for that elusive advantage that will propel them and their organizations to greater success. It explores the practical aspects of the schism between managers and leaders, suggesting ways to exploit this natural tension to gain positive results. Offering a wealth of insights drawn from over 15 years as a top management consultant, Craig Hickman shows the ways in which the strengths of these two distinct personality types complement each other. From the strategic analyzer and the strategy planner to the concrete thinker and the visionary to the nit-picker and the risk-taker--he shows how each individual perspective contributes to overall success. While specific chapters are grouped around five major organizational success factors, it is designed for rapid, random access depending on the reader's interests.