Title A Dream with a Deadline
Subtitle How to turn a vision for tomorrow into a plan for today
Authors Jacques Horovitz with Anne-Valérie Ohlsson-Corboz
FTPH
[ BACK JACKET ]
Forget strategic planning. What every organization needs today is an inspirational vision of the future – a dream.But this cannot be an unachievable and open-ended fantasy. It must have a clear focus, and it must have a beginning and an end: in short, what you need is a dream with a deadline.
A vision needs to be collaborative, bringing in inputs from all sides and levels of the organization. It should be flexible and open enough to respond to shifts in our current fast-moving business environment. It must have a timetable, so that progress and success can be measured and rewarded. And it has to be realistic. A Dream with a Deadline tells you how to create such a vision for your company. Follow its guidelines and you will end up with a very specific and clear vision that can be visually expressed on a single page.
An invaluable companion for any manager who cares more about making the future happen than watching it happen.
[ FRONT FLAP ]
A book for dreamers – dreamers with the courage and commitment to make their dreams come true.
A Dream with a Deadline shows you how to clarify your vision of where you want to go, then it shows you how to get there.
It puts forward a practical approach that will help managers and companies to:
· Clarify the company’s direction for the future
· Balance long-term strategy and short-term delivery
· Share the vision by communicating to everyone within the organization, at all levels, to obtain buy-in and ownership of the vision
· Enlist the energy, motivation and enthusiasm of everyone to achieve results
· Track and monitor the progress made and the results achieved
· Be an effective and disciplined leader to make sure your actions and behaviour send out the right message
Use the book’s self-diagnostic exercise to reveal where your energy, time and resources should be concentrated to make your vision happen. Then start putting your vision into action, today.
[ BACK FLAP ]
About the authors
Jacques Horovitz is Professor of Service Strategy, Service Marketing & Service Management at IMD, Lausanne. He has previously served as Executive Vice President of marketing and sales for Club Med North America; as Managing Director (Marketing and International) for the GrandVision group, a listed retail speciality store chain; and as coach to the Executive Committee of Disneyland Paris, as well as head of quality of training. He is currently CEO of a hotel chain he created ten years ago.
Through his own pan-European consulting company, Jacques has advised the CEOs of more than one hundred companies in a wide variety of sectors. He has researched and published widely on service strategies and service quality, relationship marketing and customer bonding. His publications include the international best-sellers Quality of Service; Total Customer Satisfaction; and Service Strategy now in its second edition.
Anne-Valérie Ohlsson-Corboz has been a Research Associate at IMD since 1999, working on business strategy, mergers and acquisitions and the challenges of managing people in a global organization. She also has substantial experience as a practitioner, having worked in marketing roles for Pfizer and the International Olympic Committee.
Anne-Valérie is co-author of the book People Strategies for Global Firms. She has also written for Sloan Management Review and the FT Handbook of Management and has published a substantial number of case studies. Her current research interests include how companies make smart big moves and anti-establishment marketing; and the influence of multi-culture exposure during childhood.