Pax Japonica

How engaged are your employees, really? Companies talk about “employee engagement” and they accept its importance, yet strangely, they adopt out-dated methods when analysing and measuring this engagement. A leading engagement expert offers a new framework for taking the genuine pulse of a company – so that leaders and management can truly understand how their people are feeling, and know what actions to take that result in better performance. Based on making results instantly and transparently available, and then determining with employees the real factors that lie within their feelings, managers can more easily assess the way they need to approachan issue. If, as the cliché goes, “people are a company’s greatest asset”, then ensuring their close engagement is essential for anycompany. This book argues powerfully for a radical new approach to employee engagement, based on understanding the minds and emotions of the people who work in organizations.

All organizations are on a trajectory to a future: their default future. This is where they will end up if they take no action other than that currently planned. Leaders are accountable for confronting this default future and taking the actions needed to set a trajectory to an improved future. Sounds easy, but the challenge lies in understanding the forces both internal and external that determine the current trajectory. Only then can strategic opportunities be explored, a trajectory of strategic intent defined and the conditions for turning strategic intent into operational reality put in place. This book won t tell you what your strategy should be, nor does it present a multi-step approach to developing strategy. What it will do is help you understand why developing and executing strategy remains such a challenge. It will also help readers understand the role they need to play at a personal level if they are passionate about leading their organization beyond its default future.