Grateful to you in ‘22!
It was a joy to be able to spend time virtually – and in precious rare cases – in real life – with you over the past year. I appreciate the conversations, the questions, the support and the companionship of so many of you as we figured out the ongoing challenge of unprecedentedly uncertain times.
A fast recap in this video.
One of the highlights for me was that, my good friend Amy Edmondson and I were chosen to head up the Thinkers50 list of top ranked management thinkers. Many good friends and Fireside chat guests are also on the list.
Valize emerges from stealth
Building robust innovation and transformation capability is not easy stuff. Most of the time, major change efforts don’t work out. And when they don’t, the organizations behind them go into decline or even fail outright. This is the fundamental problem that led me to found Valize, an “un-consultancy” dedicated to helping organizations build capability for the long-term. The goal is to establish a strategy, planning, and asset review cadence, or SPARC for your organization.
Sparc Starter advisory program
For many clients, a short advisory engagement is a great way to start. Sometimes it’s to do with solving wicked problems. Sometimes it is to provide an experienced perspective. Sometimes it’s creating the right structures, metrics, and operational practices. We typically start out with an engagement we call a Sparc Starter – a 4-6 week deep dive in which we work with internal teams to create awareness and a sense of urgency, diagnose the issues, create a common language and set out a roadmap. Ron Boire, Valize partner, and I lead this work personally, supported by our great team at Valize.
SparcHub software
Supplementing the advisory offering is a software tool we call SparcHub. It provides a kind of connective tissue between your strategy process, your budgeting activities, your project governance mechanisms and the people you need to carry all this out. It adds transparency and visibility to what’s going on with your innovation programs and provides a tool that scales best practices. This fun trailer will give you the idea:
The LearningHub
Because you can’t workshop your way to a scalable solution, we’ve also launched a series of learning modules which allow individuals and teams to learn, and more importantly, put into practice, new techniques. Specifically designed to be used on-the-job, the Valize Learning Modules let everybody share a common language, frameworks and approaches, whether you need 50 people to understand them or 50,000. Results are faster and more consistent than other ways of upskilling.
The modules contain dozens of videos, downloadable instructions and templates and plenty of opportunity for learners to form a community, supported with live professor office hours and ‘ask me anything’ sessions. This video gives you an in-depth look at the introductory module, on discovery driven planning:
All together now
Each of these offerings can be used on a standalone basis – just advisory, just the software or just the learning modules. But we believe they are at their most powerful when used together. To get on the calendar for a demo or discuss how we might work together, please contact Jacora Kiser, Jacora@valize.com, who will make sure we get you to the right place.
Thought Sparks and More for 2022
Each week, I publish an original article on topics that I think are interesting or instructive. I call them “thought sparks” because the idea is to spark your thinking! These are available for free, wherever you find convenient. You can subscribe on Substack and they’ll be delivered right to your inbox. You can subscribe to my newsletter channel on LinkedIn, and you’ll get a notice when they are published. You can subscribe on Medium and receive notices. And you can look any of them up and do a deep dive on my web site, www.ritamcgrath.com/sparks. Check them out!
Also in 2022, I’ll be continuing with my Friday Fireside Chat series. These are hourlong sessions with some of the world’s most influential thought leaders, entrepreneurs, business thinkers and authors which are available live and recorded for later viewing. This coming year, I’ll be doing them every other week, typically on a Friday at 11:00 Eastern time. You can access them all on YouTube at this channel. They are also available as audio podcasts for people who are sick of staring at screens, wherever podcasts are offered.
For a flavor of what they are like, here’s a montage from the past year:
I also try to make valuable resources available to my community, including downloadable tools and articles which you’ll find at www.valize.com/resources. Among the most popular is a “BareBones” NPV calculator which lets you estimate the lifetime value of a project with just 9 input variables
In other exciting news, Columbia Business School has moved to its brand-new campus after 60 years in a building that looked as though it was designed by General Motors (and maybe it was). We’ll be offering actual, in person, courses there.
My course on growth and change, called Leading Strategic Growth and Change is scheduled to run next May, for a week, in person! Click here for more information.
If you are curious about my upcoming schedule, your go-to resource is my “events” page. Click here to view it.
Get in Touch, Keep in Touch and an invitation to shape the agenda
We’re all about learning new things in 2022. You can follow me on Twitter (@rgmcgrath), on Instagram (@ritamcgrathofficial), on LinkedIn and on YouTube.
And an invitation: If there are topics you’d like to see me explore in a Thought Spark, let me know!
Here’s to a very happy 2022.