Today's business world is extremely complex and challenging.
It's easy for even the most seasoned executive to make a mistake or overlook a detail that can lead to utter failure for his or her business. We have entered a new commercial age. The business models from the past that relied heavily on size and leverage will no longer deliver returns.
Clearly, regulatory restructuring on a global scale is underway. Transparency is being demanded from all quarters, which is thus reconstituting the way businesses are run. In turn, all of this change is informing the design and evolution of the millennium's new economy.
As a result, executives are being tasked to optimize their enterprise's organizational structures, to enhance product and service delivery models, and to blaze new paths to unmatched market reach. This is not a trivial task in and of itself, but add to that the "need for speed," driven by the continued advancement of technological capabilities, and this generation of business executives just may be facing the greatest management challenge of the postindustrial era.
To be successful in this extremely complex and unstable business environment, executive leaders must do all that they can to simplify. There is a great deal of meaning and relevance packed into each leadership effort. The approach to how a given manager performs or oversees each result will vary greatly and be influenced by all sorts of variables that are unique to an organization and a manager's experience.
Therefore, executive checklists and leadership reference guides are in order. These to-do checklists and reference guides provide a framework to be used to institute overarching, enterprise-wide transformation.
Source: James M. Kerr: The Executive Checklist: A Guide for Setting Direction and Managing Change