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"More than ever, business success now comes down to teams.
Of course, teams have always been vitally important. One hundred thousand years ago, hunting teams were vital to the survival of early man. With the rise of agricultural civilization, teams were the basic operating unit of social hierarchies and communities. But for the last few millennia, while remaining a crucial building block, teams have been largely made subordinate to larger social organizations: armies, governments, bureaucracies, corporations, etc.
But the rise of the digital age, the Internet, and the global economy has changed all of that. As with many other cultural institutions, technology is beginning to turn organizations upside down. "
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"The Customer Room is the glue that unites a leadership team to focus and improve customers' lives to earn the right to growth.
Building a customer room to step leaders and the organization through your customers' lives and walk in their shoes monthly, quarterly, and annually is one of the most robust actions you can take to align leaders and drive customer-driven action. It engages leaders personally in customers' lives and unites them to make decisions. It establishes an accountability forum that transcends most governance meetings on the subject, where projects are reported but engaging in understanding and improving customers' lives is not always built-in."
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"The United Nations Global Compact (UNGC) is the world's largest corporate responsibility movement with some 8,000 businesses employing over 50 million people in around 150 countries.
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Encouraging as it is, 8,000 companies represents only about ten percent of truly international companies in the world and only a tiny fraction of the small and medium enterprises which provide most employment. If we are to achieve real change we need to engage a much wider range of companies."
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"Linda Darling-Hammond, in the preface to her 1997 book The Right to Learn: A Blueprint for Creating Schools That Work, wrote:
'Rigid and bureaucratic, [our current education system] was never designed to teach all children effectively, to teach learners in all their varieties, to attend to each child's particular mix of aptitudes and barriers to learning. Educating all children effectively is the mission of schools today, yet great numbers of children still have no reasonable opportunity to acquire the knowledge and abilities that will help them thrive in and contribute to today's society.'
As Linda Darling-Hammond points out in the quote above history has rendered judgments about the outcomes of our school system that do not reflect well on our record of success, assuming that the goal is to educate all our future citizens. Historically there have been (and remain) large segments of the United States population that have been educationally neglected despite the mandate to attend school. Since we've never succeeded before, is it even reasonable to consider it possible? I will argue that if we continue to enforce the delivery of instruction in the same way that it has been done for thousands of years, then the answer is no, it is not possible to educate all children. I will further argue that the answer could be yes, if we take seriously an approach to educating children that is grounded in the current scientific understanding of how the satisfaction of human needs causes effective and efficient learning."
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"Enterprises everywhere are experiencing the 'business outcome gap.' The business outcome gap can be defined as the difference between desired business outcomes and realized business outcomes. Desired outcomes are changing in response to rapidly evolving stakeholder needs, whether the stakeholders are employees, customers, or shareholders. Globalization, disruptive technologies, smart devices, and social media have all had a profound effect on how we approach work and get important programs done. While realized outcomes may be improving, for most enterprises the increase in desired outcomes is far outstripping the realized. Not only do enterprises see a business outcome gap, but also the lack of innovation to stay relevant to the dynamic needs of the customer and market. In order to close the business outcome gap, constantly innovate, and get more customer centric, enterprises are increasingly embarking on business transformation programs or large-scale strategic projects. However, according to a recent study, organizations lose an average of a staggering $109 million for every $1 billion spent on projects."
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