Assessing Your Progress

Mega Thinking and Planning can make you and your organization successful. The choice to do it is up to you. The Pocket Guide has given you the basics. This is a good time to compare where you started in Chapter 1 with where you are now in terms of using Mega Thinking and Planning to create a new future for defining and delivering success.

Table 1.1. (repeated from Chapter 1).
Defining What Is and What Should Be for gaining commitment to Mega Thinking and Planning.

Compare your response in Chapter 1 with where you and your organization are now. See, change is possible and useful!

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Apply all that is in this Manager’s Pocket Guide and create success that you can prove. It will allow you to be successful in the realities of change, choices, and consequences.

It works.

Endnotes

1.   Based in part on Kaufman, R., & Clark, R. (Oct., 1999). Re-establishing performance improvement as a legitimate area of inquiry, activity, and contribution: Rules of the road. Performance Improvement, 38(9), pp. 13–18.

2.   President Harry S. Truman used this as his guide to make decisions and take actions.

3.   Mega, Macro, and Micro are not code for big, smaller, and smallest.

4.   Recall that these three types of results are blurred in our literature. It would seem that every result is called an “outcome” and thus obscures the importance of three related types of results as well as the consequences and value added of each.

5.   Based on Kaufman, R. (2006). Seven stupid things people do when they attempt strategic thinking and planning. In Silberman, R., & Phillips, P. The 2006 ASTD Organization Development and Leadership Sourcebook. Alexandria, VA.

6.   Based in part on Kaufman, R., Oakley-Browne, H., Watkins, R. & Leigh, D. (2003). Practical strategic planning: Aligning people, performance, and payoffs. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer.

7.   This 14-step process for achieving high impact—Mega results—was inspired by Kaufman and Stone (1982), and also provided in Kaufman, R., Oakley-Brown, H., Watkins, R., & Leigh, D. (2003).

8.   This concept is from Drucker, P. F. (1973). Management: tasks, responsibilities, practices. New York: Harper & Row.

9.   Some basics on this may be found in Lick, D., & Kaufman, R. (Winter, 2000–2001). Change creation: The rest of the planning story. Planning for Higher Education, 29(2), pp. 24–36; Roberts, W. (1987). Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. New York: Warner; Conner, D. R. (1992). Managing at the speed of change. New York: Villard Books, Division of Random House; Conner, D. R. (1998). Building nimble organizations. New York: John Wiley & Sons, among other sources on change and leadership.

10.   Based on Kaufman, R. (2000). Mega Planning: Practical tools for organizational success. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Also Planificación Mega: Herramientas practices paral el exito organizacional. (2004). Traducción de Sonia Agut. Universitat Jaume I. Castelló de la Plana, Espana.

11.   Based on Kaufman, R., & Guerra-Lopez, I. (2008). The assessment book: Applied strategic thinking and performance improvement through self-assessments. Amherst, MA: HRD Press, Inc.