Stand Back and Deliver (PDF)

Agile Leadership Techniques Focused on What Matters Most: Business Value and Competitive Advantage

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. It brings together immediately-usable frameworks and step-by-step processes that help you focus all your efforts where they matter most: delivering business value and building competitive advantage.

You'll first discover how to use the authors' Purpose-Based Alignment Model to make better up-front decisions on 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 practical tools for understanding the unique challenges of any project and tailoring your leadership approach to reflect 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 again: knowing when to step up and lead, and when to stand back and let your team work.

Coverage includes:

• Effectively evaluating, planning, and implementing large system projects
• Reducing resistance to process improvements
• Bringing greater agility to the way you manage products, portfolios, and projects
• Identifying the tasks that don't create enough value to be worth your time
• Developing the forms of collaboration that are crucial to sustaining innovation
• Mitigating project risks more effectively-especially those associated with complexity
• Refocusing all decision-making on delivering value to the organization and the marketplace
• Making decisions at the right time to leverage the best information without stifling progress