What You Will Learn

Engage in long-term thinking to combat the tendency for short-term thinking to undermine innovation and employee engagement within a company.
Go far beyond vision statements as you find, generate, and clearly articulate the "big ideas" that inspire collective action within a team or organization.
Use of concrete, sensory language and storytelling to avoid vague, "blurry" visions and help them come to life.
Connect strategic planning, vision and big ideas to the organization's ESG commitments and sustainability commitments.
Explore the connection between vision and agile development, and how to "productize" it for successful execution.
Strengthen the foundation for agile execution by focusing on how the four key pillars enable vision and big idea activation within a company or stifle innovation and relevancy.

Overview

Research shows that less than 10% of leaders consider themselves to be visionary and few think long-term about all stakeholders and their needs. This is a problem, as employees, product management teams, project managers and other stakeholders want to be part of a company with bold, clear strategic goals and strategic objectives that are ignited by a clearly described future state. The “why movement” linked to crafting purpose and organization’s mission statements is now being supplanted by the emerging “where movement.” This movement goes beyond brainstorming towards declaring the “big ideas” tied to long term goals that will inspire stakeholders and create a competitive advantage. “Where are we going?” as an organization is the primal question posed by employees that CEOs and product managers must smartly address. This program will show you how.

Furthermore, the rise of ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) investors and stakeholders has increased the pressure on companies to take a longer-term view and link their vision to sustainable measures that delight a broad set of stakeholders.

As leaders pivot from the vision towards strategy execution, they are then met with either resistance or lift as organizational architecture and economics bring realism against the aspiration. Operational plans must confront and align their 4 pillars that will enable leaders to execute the organizations goals or wind up frustrated by the inertia that they create. The 4-pillar methodology delivers a strategic framework that makes the linkage between:

1) Performance measurement and goal setting (OKRs or KPIs)

2) Establishing team structures, organization charts and empowerment

3) Rewards, punishments and incentives, and

4) Corporate culture (norms, values, behaviors and assumptions).

One example of a leader who successfully applied this strategic framework is CEO Satya Nadella of Microsoft. By focusing on these four pillars, he was able to transform the organization’s mission and pursue new opportunities that led Microsoft to become one of the most valuable companies in the world. Too often leaders simply change an element of culture or a piece of performance evaluation and there is a breakdown as they must look at all four pillars simultaneously. Nadella reset Microsoft’s business model and strategy as he optimized the four pillars against a strategy map that helped all employees know what mattered the most. Once in place, Microsoft began to unleash an effective product strategy chasing new time frames that routinely encourages product plans that are bold with outstanding user experiences.

The program will also dissect cases like Wells Fargo where the business strategy and 4 pillars were misaligned and drove young employees to promote opening accounts with disastrous results for consumers and shareholders.

This two-part course will make the connection between a long-term vision and strategic planning driven by the CEO and C-suite and the translation down to product design teams and project managers who live in day-to-day execution. By reinforcing mechanisms that drive constructive behaviors, the course will help leaders turn their big ideas into practical, tangible products. In doing so, it will make the power of vision more accessible and help leaders to create value for all stakeholders. By focusing on long-term vision (and exploring cathedral and multi-generational thinking) and clearly communicating it through concrete language, imagery, initiatives and storytelling, CEOs and founders as well as the product managers can set their organization apart and unite their people towards a common, achievable future. This course will teach how your business plan and business goals can be elevated by vision (big ideas) and executed through the proper alignment and reinforcement mechanisms within the 4 pillars.

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Certificate At A Glance

Expert Instruction
2 Skill Building Courses

Self-Paced
‍Progress at your own speed

2 Months
2 - 3 hours per week

$448.20
For the full program experience
Regularly $498.00 when paying per-course

20 Professional Development Units (PDUs)
Earn PDUs toward your Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Mangement Professional (PMP) certification

Product Visioning and Strategy: Preparing for Agile Execution

Generate big ideas and a culture of innovation

What You Will Learn

Overview

Certificate At A Glance

Courses

Generating Vision: Long-Term Big Ideas That Motivate Employees and Stakeholders

The Productization of a Vision: Linking Operations to Strategy

What Our Students Are Saying

Job Outlook

Instructors

Daniel Forrester

Corporate Endorsement

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