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LEARNING LINKS
Value Creation and Business Success

PEGASUS CONFERENCE CORNER
The World Café at the 2004 Pegasus Conference

FACE TO FACE
Taking an Organization to New Heights: An Interview with Christiano Schena
by Kali Saposnick

Christiano V. Schena is a vice president of Caterpillar Inc., the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, and industrial gas turbines. During a distinguished career that has taken him around the world, Chris has built a reputation for fostering workplace collaborations that lead to extraordinary results. He will be a keynote speaker at the 2004 Pegasus Conference, to be held on December 1–3, 2004, in Boston, Massachusetts. In the following interview, Chris describes some of the "soft" and "hard" tools he uses to build sustainable excellence in the various businesses he leads.

In 1996, Christiano Schena was sent to Brazil to improve the performance of Caterpillar's Brazilian operation, located in Piracicaba. His first step was to motivate the employees to rebuild the business themselves. This approach and the resulting employee engagement not only helped turn the company around, but also earned the facility a notable operational excellence certification and the country's most prestigious quality award.

Once internal issues had been resolved, Caterpillar Brazil used a similar empowerment approach to initiate a civil society project engaging area citizens in addressing community issues. Brazil's federal government has since adopted the program as a pilot for the whole country. How was this level of success achieved? According to Chris, "at the heart of managing for performance is good communication. Before you can implement any of the hard metrics, you need to be able to engage every employee in supporting the company's vision."

Continue reading the interview

Learn more about the 2004 Pegasus Conference

Explore other corporate senior executives' thoughts on creating outstanding organizations

LEARNING LINKS
Value Creation and Business Success
by Paul O'Malley

Many managers who view themselves as the heroic guardians of shareholder interests—the no-nonsense, tough-as-nails guys who run their businesses by the numbers and who think that "organizational culture" and "shared values" are irrelevant fantasies concocted by out-of-touch academics—may be inadvertently running their companies into the ground and systematically destroying their investors' wealth. Why? Because in today's information economy, it is the intangible assets, such as employee satisfaction, learning, R&D effectiveness, and customer loyalty, that drive revenue growth and profitability.

The most successful organizations understand that any business's purpose is to create value for customers, employees, and investors, and that the interests of these three groups are inextricably linked. If managers define the organization's goals too narrowly—for example, to maximize this quarter's reported earnings—they may stumble into a downward spiral of poor decision-making that is difficult to reverse. They may choose to reduce employee training and compensation, which could lead to low employee morale and poor performance. Or they may scrimp on R&D, allowing product lines to age and customers to become dissatisfied and begin to defect.

Alternatively, if managers define their company's interests broadly enough to include customers and employees, an equally powerful spiral of value creation can occur. Highly motivated, well-trained, properly rewarded employees deliver outstanding service, while effective R&D investments lead to products that enjoy a significant value-adding advantage and generate higher margins. Satisfied, loyal customers (and new customers responding to word-of-mouth referrals) drive revenue growth and profitability for investors. In an environment of accelerating change, and given the nature of the emerging information economy, this course is increasingly the only viable approach to business success.

Read the complete article, or see The Systems Thinker, V9N2 (March 1998)

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Take advantage of a special offer on three volumes from our Innovation in Management Series that focus on aligning individual and organizational values

PEGASUS CONFERENCE CORNER
The World Café at the 2004 Pegasus Conference

Using the World Café methodology to inquire into questions that matter about particular themes has been one of the high points of past Pegasus conferences. The cafés intentionally foster learning conversations, knowledge sharing, and new possibilities for action. At the 2004 Pegasus Conference, Building Collaborations to Change Our Organizations and the World: Systems Thinking in Action®," to be held on December 1–3 at the Hyatt Regency Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, the World Café will again play an important role in how we consider these and other questions:

• What tools (personal and/or organizational) are essential to foster successful collaboration?
• How does systems thinking facilitate strategic insight and improve the outcomes for collaborative partners?
• What conditions must exist for true collaboration to happen? How can we build collaborations that succeed despite all odds?
• What kind of leadership is needed to build successful collaborations? How do you "grow" that leadership?
• In what ways are "communities of practice" collaborative?
• How can partners from different sectors capitalize on their differences to create new responses to long-term challenges?
• What is the difference between a "good team" and a true collaborative experience?
• Why do so many collaborations fail? What can we learn from both the successes and the failures?

Our team of café hosts, coordinated by Juanita Brown and David Isaacs, will be on hand to help us generate great conversations that spur us to action. Learn more about the World Café

REGISTER NOW for $1095—and save $500 off the standard rate! Register on our web site, or call 1-781-398-9700.

SPECIAL OFFER! When you register, you will receive 10% off Pegasus products purchased on our web site, from the day you register until the conference starts on December 1, 2004. (This offer is not applicable to other conferences or newsletters and cannot be combined with other discounts.) The sooner you register, the sooner you'll start saving on your Pegasus purchases, so sign up today!

FROM THE FIELD
DynamiQUEST 2004: A Celebration of Student Accomplishment
by Greg Hennessy

More than 30 students from across New England gathered on the campus of Worcester Polytechnic Institute on May 14 to share their hard-won experiences as budding practitioners of systems thinking and system dynamics. DynamiQUEST was launched in 2000 to provide a venue for students Grades 3–12 to showcase their work in ST/SD and for students and teachers to network with each other. At the event, participants take turns presenting their projects, coaching other students, and experiencing systems thinking-oriented games and activities.

This year, the schools represented were Bromfield School, Carlisle Public Schools, Chelmsford High School, Murdoch Middle School, and Williston Central School. Also participating was Brookfield High School from Ottawa, Ontario. Throughout the day, students received coaching and encouragement from a number of teachers and systems thinking experts. Luminaries present included Jay Forrester, Dennis Meadows, and Khalid Saeed (whose Department of Social Sciences and Policy Studies at WPI hosted the event). Lees Stuntz of the Creative Learning Exchange, an organization that advocates systems education, was emcee and kept everyone on track.

Many of the student projects addressed environmental and resource management problems, but public policy, social systems, and mathematical and physics problems were also represented. These projects employed a range of tools, from qualitative problem structuring to stock and flow computer modeling. Because the event was an exhibition and learning session rather than a competition, no awards were presented. But given the high caliber of work demonstrated by all, the real winner of DynamiQUEST 2004 was the systems thinking community.