The Impact of IBP

Aspiria certified trainers have worked with individuals, with small and medium business clients, as well as with multi-billion dollar international corporations with tens of thousands of employees. Almost every day we get feedback from people that have partici- pated in IBP workshops, trainings or confere- nces, telling us how it positively changed their perspective on business, their business relati- onships, work-life balance and in numerous occasions their private life. We get letters from people happy because they were finally making progress in their career, from people who have found a new meaning in their work and even a movie from one of the research and development engi- neers with Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology about how the IBP training has influenced his worldview and his life. Some corporations have waiting lists for IBP trainings because managers are making it mandatory in their people's MBO's. Others are enthusiastic in pursuing advanced level trainings. Why does this happen? There are lots of theories we could offer, like: "People don't really know themselves and why they behave how they behave, why their work and their relation- ships look the way they do. In this respect, IBP gives them one of the most significant insights they could have - insight into themselves." Or: "People like tools and techniques that help them be more successful in their work and in their life." Or "It's different", or "It's trendy", or..., or... These might all well be true, but interestingly, what most people give us as explanation is that "they see, hear and feel that IBP is making a real impact on their work and life". Top performing businesses place their focus on performance. It is claimed that the self-propelled perfor- mance management system is: • the fastest known method for career promotion, • the quickest way for career advancement, • the surest way for career progress, • the best ingredient in career path planning, • the only true and lasting virtue for career success, • and the most neglected part in teachings about business principles. Perhaps the best known of several perfor- mance management frameworks is the Balanced Scorecard. The first balanced scorecard was created in 1987 by an independent management consultant Art Schneiderman. The concept was popularized in 1992 and 1993 by Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton in Harvard Busi- ness Review articles and in the book "The Balanced Scorecard" published in 1996. In order to illustrate and elaborate the bala- nced scorecard, in 2001 Kaplan and Norton introduced the concept of strategy map. Stra-

tegy map is a visual representation of the stra- tegy of an organization. It illustrates how the organization plans to achieve its mission and vision by means of a linked chain of continuous improvements. The "balance" in the balanced scorecard refers to the recognition that to achieve a compre- hensive view of an organization's performance, it needs to be seen from different viewpoints, or perspectives. In the past, organizations only tended to look at financial measures, which are lagging indicators. Leading indicators come from three other perspectives, so that there are four perspectives in all: • Learning and growth perspective: “How do we improve and create value?” • Internal process perspective: “What must we excel at?” • Customer perspective: “How do customers see us?” • Financial perspective “What would be the (financial) RESULT if we do all of this?” These four perspectives describe any organization's strategy. Strategic improvements flow from the bottom up to a final result. This information is encoded in the strategy map. The arrows of effect are from lower perspectives to higher perspectives, like in the following example: Hermessianex was a Greek poet who lived about 400 B.C. Not much is know about him, but some of his words resonated so strongly to the world that we remember them even today. In a four-word phrase he summarized the first principle of IBP: "As within, so without." The world we build within ourselves determi- nes the results in our business reality. On this foundation, IBP has built its Leadership Principle: “What you do to your Self, You do to your People. What you do to your People, You do to Yourself. As Within, so Without. As with People, so with Results.”

Though the intangible assets of an organiza- tion are the most powerful means by which to effect permanent change in the organization, the idea of strategy maps is to plan in a top down way -- start with the needs of the higher perspectives and work downwards to figure out what is needed at the level of “Learning and Growth”, which includes the human, organization and information capital. Learning & Growth is precisely the area where IBP can contribute the most to the Kaplan- Norton BSC model. First, it makes it more explicit by drawing the following illustration: All four perspectives are still here, but now we made it more obvious that the Learning & Growth perspective has a direct and decisive influence on all other perspectives. By applying cybernetic principles to this BSC representation, the specific role this perspe- ctive has becomes even more interesting. We then bring into our awareness that the People within L&G are part of the system, aware of self- referentiality, self-organizing, the subject-object problem, etc. And as such, their inner worlds determine their outer reality and results: