How can we combine OD skills and business knowledge?

Our February 8 meeting was “OD Meets MBA: Learning and Leveraging the Language of Business” and was led by three-time Learning Group presenter Harvy Simkovits, a/k/a “Mr. Business Wisdom”. We learned Harvy’s model for relating the Top Game, Inside Game, and Outside Game of Business and applied it to a case study.

In a sense, this was a follow up to our November 2005 “Future of OD” meeting. On that occasion, one item on our brainstormed list of “things OD needs to do” was to develop business skills and knowledge. Harvy’s combined expertise in both areas gave us some good answers to that question.

Harvy closed by asking to use “both hands” - the OD hand and the business hand - in our work. But we should not forget the lesson of our October 2005 program: we also need to use our heart as well as our hands!

In addition to the general issue selected above as our Question of the Month, we came up with some other questions for further consideration, viz.:

How can we deal with downsizing and restructuring?

What do you when board or team meeting turn into a fight?

What should ask in your first, fifteen minute, meeting with a CEO?

How can we deal the impact of family members on the boards of family owned businesses?

How we can lead from “what clients want” to what we believe is “the real problem”?

What metrics can be used to measure OD success and how can we get agreement on those metrics?

How we prevent “consultant dependency,” i.e., get organizations to be able to on their what we do for them?

How can make sure that OD interventions last and organizations don’t “relapse” to their old behavior?

We invite members to post their comments on these issues and to suggest additional related questions.