Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility

by Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Kent J. McDonald

Enhance Fundamental Value and Establish Competitive Advantage with Leadership Agility Whether you’re leading an organization, a team, or a project, Stand Back and Deliver gives you the agile leadership tools you’ll need to achieve breakthrough levels of performance. This book brings together immediately usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter delivering business value and building competitive advantage. You’ll first discover how to use the authors’ Purpose Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions about where to invest limited resources–and how to filter out activities that don’t drive market leadership. Next, you’ll learn how to collaborate in new ways that unleash your organization’s full talents for innovation. The authors offer the Context Leadership Model for understanding the unique challenges of any project, and they help you tailor your leadership approach to address them. You’ll find a full chapter on organizing information to promote more effective, value-driven decision-making. Finally, drawing on decades of experience working with great leaders, the authors focus on a critical issue you’ll face over and over knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team produce results. Coverage includes

Genres: Business, Leadership, Management, Nonfiction

186 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2009

Reviews

[E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Managing projects and solving difficult situations within organizations can be devilishly difficult. Complexity and uncertainty can provoke inappropriate, even counterproductive, judgments and actions. In such circumstances, you need special tools and processes to help you sort out your strategy and make better choices. Co-authors Pollyanna Pixton, Niel Nickolaisen, Todd Little and Kent McDonald provide effective mechanisms for managing projects and solving problems. They approach business decision making with careful deliberation, analytical precision and sound reasoning. Their book provides the support systems you need to weigh your options and address your business dilemmas. getAbstract finds that leaders at all levels will benefit from knowing this book’s hands-on tools.

Read more about this book in the online summary:
http://www.getabstract.com/zusammenfa...

[Christophe Addinquy · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a kind of toolbox, between agile management and product management. Mainly it's about 4 models, with one that happens to be very useful : the purpose alignment model. It halps understand and challenge projects portfolio. I'm less convinced by the value model which is not really a model at the end.
The book is short and everything doesn't holds the same value, but there's enough of that to justify the reading.
ma note de lecture en français ici

[André Gomes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good advice and tools for managers. Nice stories.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely enjoyed this quick and easy to ready book and a topic that has aged really well and stays relevant. It talks about strategy, portfolio assessments in the context of pragmatism based on ideas being differentiating x mission critical for an organization along with a number of other useful mental models / tools to use to aid conversation.

[Sondra · Rating 5 out of 5]

The authors offer some important and easy to grasp tools that can be utilized by anyone interested in moving their organization in a more strategic direction. They encourage leaders to enable and empower their organizations rather than defaulting to a command and control style. This book is long enough to fully explain the topics and provide useful examples, but short enough that it can easily be read by a busy professional. I highly recommend this book.

[Scott · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting concepts discussed in the book -- definitely contains material worth thinking through from a business perspective.
However, it suffers from multiple authorship (it's neither seemless nor obvious who is writing) and some annoying repetitiveness...