Using Overpowering Influences to Propel Your Company to New Heights -IRRESISTIBLE FORCE MANAGEMENT-

This management technology is so powerful that it dwarfs all those that have gone before
. . . in the same way the Saturn V moon rocket dwarfed a child's firecracker. Hold onto your hats, your seats, and your loved ones . . . and take the best ride of your life.

Let Nature Be Your Guide

Successful athletes often describe their feelings during peak performance as "going with the flow." Nature provides us with numerous examples of this.

Flying with the jet stream behind you is much faster than pressing on the nose of your plane.

Can you go faster by skiing down a mountain, or by climbing up it through the snow and ice? Gravity and friction play such large roles that you find the trip down goes much quicker than the trip up unless you do not know how to ski or hurt yourself on the way down. Sky divers rely on the same factors to have an experience that excites them.

According to the old tale, the little Dutch boy saved all of Holland by putting his finger in the dike until the hole could be repaired. Otherwise, the sea would have drowned the country. I saw a remarkable example of that power a few years ago in the Bay of Fundy, where the highest tides occur, when the onrushing high tide actually caused a river to run uphill for miles.

If you are on board the Space Shuttle, you will go up when the engines are ignited unless they are shut down before lift off occurs. With computer-controlled aim, you will end up in space in a few minutes and move easily in a weightless environment – something humans have only been able to achieve in the last few decades. As a passenger, you get there at the same time the pilot does, with little personal effort.

Beyond the Earth's gravity, atmosphere, and tides, space flight goes on much faster . . . with effortless ease. Remember how small a portion of the Saturn V rocket (less than 10%) was needed to go from Earth orbit to the Moon and back again to Earth (over 95% of the total distance covered by the astronauts)?

Imagine what would happen if we combined the immense power of gravity, rocket engines, momentum, the oceans, and the wind to drive your company forward into the near-vacuum of Outer Space where there is little to resist you. Imagine the difference that would make than if we had to resist or neutralize these enormous power sources. These overpowering influences at our back would overwhelm any effort to go in a different direction, and progress would be extremely rapid.

That is what Irresistible Force Management is all about. You focus your company's attention on those forces that will be strongest on your company, and turn these forces into helpful sources of propulsion pushing in the same direction.

Some people who recently read about Future Management, and found its promise to be extraordinarily large, asked me to talk a little in this paper about how Future Management and Irresistible Force Management are different.

Future Management takes you to the goal you have already chosen. You may, for example, have chosen to climb to the top of Mount Everest – something that is both very difficult to do and very dangerous. Future Management will take you there as quickly and as safely as possible, with the fewest resources used.

Irresistible Force Management will help you focus on other far-away goals that will be as easy or easier to achieve and will bring more benefits. For example, as an alternative to climbing Mount Everest, you can ride over the top of every high mountain in the world in the Space Shuttle within a few hours after launch, while your equipment performs hundreds of valuable scientific measurements to solve many problems for everyone on the planet. As a result, you learn more, have more perspective, and make a greater contribution to others with a similar amount of time spent on your part to prepare for and achieve the goal.

Company Benefits from Irresistible Force Management

Irresistible Force Management will be of most interest and value to new leaders and management teams prepared to make major changes in the current direction of the company. Those who would like to find a better way to reach the current goals and objectives should use Future Management instead. The lessons of Irresistible Force Management will probably lead to a major shift in goals, objectives, and strategy to lead to a much more successful future than the current direction could possibly deliver.

People often ask me how long it takes for benefits to occur from a new management technology. Irresistible Force Management benefits should begin within days of when the new information becomes available, because you will begin shifting resources away from lower-potential areas into higher-potential areas. The normal experience should be to achieve benefits that are a vast multiple of the cost of this technology even before you finish using it the first time. Once you begin using this management process, you will probably never use anything else again until something more powerful is developed.

Irresistible Force Management lets you see what the high-side potential really is for your company, enabling you to set goals, objectives, and strategies that match the highest level you can achieve. Most companies set their goals and objectives in light of their experiences with what they are doing today. Based on that kind of perspective, Peter Drucker observed over 20 years ago in his book, Management, that companies could not expect to grow faster than 10 percent a year for very long. Yet in this decade alone, it has become increasingly commonplace for companies of all sizes to grow for years at over 40 percent a year in real volume terms. As a result, you can expect that your future growth rate will more than double with the same or higher profitability.

Many companies spent the last five years improving quality, reengineering, downsizing, and getting costs under control. Some of these companies now find it difficult to reignite growth. Irresistible Force Management is designed to be especially useful to such companies by using their leanness as an advantage in securing faster growth. In fact, a great benefit of Irresistible Management is to make everyone much more productive within the existing structure so that the time available for people to spend on growth is greatly increased.

A key advantage is that you will vastly expand your understanding of the forces that can help or hinder your business – especially ways to increase customer demand, better focus company resources into the most productive areas, and simplify the processes of change and growth. If you are like most companies, this will be accomplished with limited distraction from your existing tasks, and will be easily absorbed and used by your organization.

Irresistible Force Management can be used from either the bottom-up or the top-down, or through a combination. In fact, you can teach it to every person in your company, just like you did with Total Quality Management processes. This is probably the only management technology that is reasonably independent of previous management process cultures in terms of its effectiveness.

Personal Benefits from Irresistible Force Management

When I wrote my recent paper on Future Management, I listed terrific personal benefits. Here they are:

"Imagine having your career tied to a company that was going nowhere . . . or worse, that is about to run off a cliff. Future Management is a great way to reduce the likelihood of having company performance harm your career.

"Do you receive some of your compensation for the overall performance of the company or the company's stock? With Future Management, that compensation will be higher.

"Do you enjoy stimulating challenges rather than impossible tasks or mind-numbing repetition? Future Management will allow you to drive into interesting, and valuable new territories for your personal development.

"Do you like to have some idea of how you are doing before a problem arises? If you dislike unpleasant surprises in your business, Future Management is the management technology for you.

"Do you want to be a better leader? What better way to be a guide to easy, fun, successful change than to have a great map of where you are heading? Future Management is that map."

I expect that the personal benefits from Irresistible Force Management will be more than 10 times the benefits of Future Management for the same person in the same company.

Using Irresistible Force Management Now

Few people like to experiment with new technologies, when something as important as the direction of the entire company is involved.

In this case, please relax and enjoy the ride. Irresistible Force Management presents sound, controlled ways to proceed. Each element of the management technology has been successfully used by many companies for at least the last 25 years. I have personally assisted companies many times in each of the related elements. What is new is that these elements are being put together for the very first time. As a prudent leader, you can choose to apply them to small test areas for study . . . and then expand into implementation only if that seems warranted. I should warn you that the new insights will propel you forward irresistibly to better goals, and that will be wonderful for you. You can be certain you will live a better, more comfortable life while enjoying more varieties of significance and achievement, yet be more appreciated by and connected to others as you grow personally and contribute to many more people.

How to Get Started

I want to help you personally to achieve the amazing and wonderful benefits that will help you and your company have a far better life and future. We should begin by discussing this over the telephone, and develop a joint plan of how you and your company should evaluate and design a way to begin using this powerful propellant to a better future. To keep these materials shorter, I have not included details of the process, but I would be happy to provide those details to you whenever you wish.

You can speed your progress by e-mailing Don Mitchell at askdonmitchell@yahoo.com just as soon as you finish reading this. Or you can reach us by e-mail at mitchell@fastforward400.com and we will usually respond the next day.

When you start using this technology, I hope you will consider letting us devote a page on the www.fastforward400.com web site to your experiences.

© 1998 Mitchell and Company

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