Managing for the Short Term

As managers, senior executives, and CEOs all over have painfully discovered, if you don't manage for the short term, you won't be around for the long term. Bestselling business author Chuck Martin found that nothing consumes business managers more than how to manage a company in the weeks and months immediately ahead.

As founder of NFI Research, an executive think tank made up of some 3,000 high-level executives at over 1,400 companies, Chuck Martin has interviewed and gathered the results of thousands of management specialists the world over to discover how companies are successfully zeroing in on improving short-term performance, while still balancing these efforts with long-term strategic goals. By looking to managers and executives at companies like IBM, SAP, Deloitte & Touche, Kraft, AT&T, Dow Chemical, and hundreds of others, Martin has uncovered the "best practices" that help propel short-term performance. Among them:

• Bridging the enormous disconnect between management's strategic goals and the ability of front-line managers and employees to implement these goals
• Moving even the biggest projects forward incrementally, delivering tangible results at each step along the way
• Putting together time-based and events-based teams that can focus specifically on essential short-term decisions and goals
• Creating incentives to reward short-term results

What Chuck Martin has found is that companies that adopt practices designed to achieve short-term results are usually better positioned to achieve their long-term strategies as well.

A critically important management book that addresses one of the overriding concerns of businesses today, Managing for the Short Term is an essential addition to any manager's toolkit.

• Part I: What Is Managing for the Short Term?
• Chapter 1: The New World of the Short Term
• A New Approach
• It Just Is
• What is Short-Term?
• The Pressures to Manage for the Short Term
• The Demands Placed on a Reduced Workforce
• Information-Armed Shareholders
• Information-Armed Stakeholders
• The Global Business Environment
• The Pace of Technological Change
• A Demographically Empowered Workforce
• A More Sophisticated and Informed Customer Base
• A New Alignment Needed
• Chapter 2: The Manager and the Business Blur
• The Daily Pressures: Managing in the Fast Lane
• The Pressures of Networking
• The Pressures of Customer Focus
• The Pressures of Managing People
• The Pressures of Process
• The Pressures of Speed
• The Modern Law of Inundation
• The Impact on the Individual
• Time-Shifting Work
• It's Not About the Money
• The View From the Corner Office
• Strike One, You're Out
• Out of Time
• Technology in the Executive Suite
• The Pressure to Communicate
• Chapter 3: The Disconnect and Its Impact on the Organization
• Corporate Truth vs. Street Truth
• The Managers' Conflict Between Short and Long Term
• The Price of The Perception Gap
• Executives As The New Facilitators
• Chapter 4: Managing for the Short Term vs. Planning for the Long Term
• The 2 Kinds of Planning
• Organizational Pace vs. Individual Pace
• Strategy: A Jumping-Off Point
• Attitude Adjustment Time
• The CFO As Sheriff
• Part II: Managing the Organization for the Short Term
• Chapter 5: It's All About the Numbers
• The Quantification of Business Life
• Learning to Live By the Quarter, Month, Week, Day
• The Death of the Low-Hanging Fruit
• Letting the Numbers Do the Work
• Measuring the Intangibles
• Going Beyond Making the Numbers
• Balancing Metrics
• Numbers Now
• Chapter 6: Incremental Forward Motion
• Short-Tacking Toward The Horizon
• Tactics for Incremental Forward Motion
• Keep It Simple
• Chop It Up
• Don't Postpone the Important Stuff
• Sort By Speed and Scope
• Focus To The Left of the Line
• Teams for the Short Term
• Incremental Forward Motion with Time-Based Teams
• Incremental Forward Motion with Task-Based Teams
• Managing Change
• Changing the Organization
• Changing Crisis By Crisis
• Managing for the Short Term Requires Independent Decisions
• Chapter 7: Are We Communicating?
• The Communications Gap
• Strategy vs. Communication Strategy
• Hear Ye, Hear Ye
• Feeling Ignored
• Is the Message Getting Through?
• Demonstrable Results: Supporting The Incentive for the CEO
• Increasing Trust: Providing The Incentive for Managers
• Information Flow: The Enabler
• Chapter 8: Communicating Down the Line
• Down the Line
• Share the Metrics
• Rewards Based on Metrics
• Moving Executive Focus To the Inside
• Chapter 9: Leading for the Short Term
• Communicating For A Reason
• CEO Leadership for the Short Term
• Gaining Support for the Vision: The Senior Executive
• Communicating Up The Pipeline
• Being a Mind-Reader
• "You Can't Handle the Truth"
• Keeping the Senior Management Informed
• Communicating in Real Time
• It's Still About the Numbers
• Chapter 10: Managing People for the Short Term
• Employee Turnover: When Is It a Problem?
• Recruitment Challenges
• Aligning Hiring With Existing Networks
• Aligning Training With Individual Desire for Autonomy
• Aligning Outplacement With The Realities of Turnover
• Keeping Those You Want
• Chapter 11: Using Information to Navigate Through Decisions
• Electronic Navigation Versus The Road Map
• Balancing Proactive and Reactive
• Information and Doing What Is Right
• Valuing Customer Information
• Immediate Customer Needs Require Immediate Response
• CRM At the Customer Level
• Using the Information Stream For Immediate Results
• The New Planning Timeframe
• The Dynamic Budget Cycle
• Getting the Benefit to the Customer
• Part III: Managing Yourself for the Short Term
• Chapter 12: Getting to What Matters
• Getting It Done
• Let Things Bubble Up
• Be Ruthless
• Be A Player-Coach
• Recognize the Value of Daily Tasks
• Chapter 13: The More You Do, the More You Do
• The List Approach
• The 20-Item List
• The Rolling List
• The Nightly List
• The Weekly List
• Double or Multiple Lists
• The Folder List
• Float Time
• Balancing Tasks With Time
• Chapter 14: Successful Meetings for the Short Term
• Quantifying the Value of Meetings
• Managing for the Short Term at Meetings
• Before The Meeting
• Create and Master the Agenda
• Be Prepared
• Be Focused
• Agree on Desired Outcomes
• During The Meeting
• Stay Focused
• Flow Information Both Ways
• Run On Time
• Provide A Sense of Resolution
• After The Meeting
• Hold People Accountable
• Limit the Frequency of Meetings
• Focus on Incremental Forward Motion
• Taming the E-Mail Monster
• Running on E-Mail
• Managing E-Mail
• E-Mail That Matters
• Chapter 15: The Law of Expanding Immediacy
• Immediacy As Competitive Advantage
• When 1 + 1 + 1 Equals 4
• Implementing Change
• Remembering to Look in the Rear-View Mirror
• Getting Long-Term and Short-Term In Sync