Product Description

This book offers a new set of metrics for identifying, analyzing, and responding to the right information at the right time—helping companies to avoid disasters and seize opportunities

Based on exclusive research into recent business catastrophes—and drawing parallels to a range of nonbusiness disasters from 9/11 to the Challenger disaster—Heads Up outlines a four-step approach managers can use to identify which pieces of information merit real-time delivery, and as importantly, which do not.

McGee then provides a practical methodology—real time opportunity detection—for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to that critical information in time to ward off negative surprises and jump on potential opportunities ahead of competitors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1023631 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 256 pages

From Publishers Weekly
These days it seems like a company’s problems don’t surface until the CEO is led away in handcuffs. But according to this illuminating primer on the fashionable Real-Time Enterprise management model, "surprises" like parts shortages, earnings disappointments, business downturns and, yes, indictments are always preceded by ample warning signs. McGee, a vice-president with the consultant group Gartner, Inc., insists that with the right information technology and methods, companies can monitor in real time the crucial five percent of business data that will give them insight into both trouble spots and unrealized opportunities. Writing in stolid but readable prose supplemented with a plethora of charts, he presents a reasonably coherent conceptual framework for following the causal chain of business mishaps back to their sources, spotting the often obscure red flags that allow managers to respond in time to head off catastrophe, and focusing on the key performance and economic metrics to monitor. He illustrates these ideas with lucid post-mortems of a number of disasters in and out of the corporate world, as well as instructive examinations of how companies like General Motors have used real-time tracking to improve a variety of business functions, including inventory, production scheduling and sales. McGee is rather sanguine about the predictability of the world, and he too easily dismisses the danger that a flood of real-time business information could prompt executives to concentrate even more narrowly on the here and now and indulge in an orgy of micromanagement. But managers looking for ways to improve their understanding of the businesses they run will find much valuable information here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Kenneth W. McGee is a group vice president and Research Fellow in Gartner Research, where he serves as the director of research in the business management and e-business sector.

Customer Reviews

A highly recommended and practical guide
Written by the group vice-president of Gartner, Inc., a research and advisory firm, Heads Up: How To Anticipae Business Surprises And Seize Opportunities First is a no-nonsense advice guide to business managers everywhere. Emphasizing that the key is being keenly aware of what is going on in the present day, and that business disasters seldom come without any kind of warning, Heads Up walks the reader through a practical methodology to paying attention of the circumstances around oneself and navigating the choppy and changeable seas of opportunity, risk, and surprise, suspected, or surmounted events. Heads Up is a highly recommended and practical guide to raising entrepreneurial and corporate awareness.

Transform Business Surprises into Opportunities
Business "surprises" occur with an alarming frequency. It is an understatement to say they exact a considerable toll on the organization.

According to Kenneth G. McGee, even the worst catastrophes rarely happen without warning. The author is a group vice president and research fellow at Gartner, Inc., a consultancy that specializes in information technology. His book, Heads Up, is about predicting the present.

Managers need to understand what is happening now and how these current events will impact future success. This involves extracting raw empirical information, analyzing it and determining its meaning and implications.

So what is new, you ask? McGee answers managers do not need all the data to understand the present. Only enough to answer the question, "Where are we right now in meeting our corporate goals?"

To an effective executive, this current information always reveals opportunities to improve results. There is a tendency to confuse real-time information with real-time response. In the perfect situation, the following processes happen in the background between the time when an event happens and that event's impact is felt.

1. Information related to the event is monitored.
2. A change in the information is captured.
3. The information is analyzed.
4. The information is reported.
5. A response is initiated.

No manager can afford to monitor all his information sources. To determine which sources to monitor, information should be filtered using the following Identification Model:

1. List goals for the planning period.
2. Prioritize them.
3. Evaluate them.
4. List causal events.
5. Prioritize the causal events.
6. Evaluate whether the real-time information will enable the executive to respond effectively.

Each candidate generated by the Identification Model is subjected to the Justification Model:

1. Does the goal the information further the corporate vision and mission?
2. Does the goal meet current corporate priorities?
3. Is the information material to the goal?
4. What is the goal's corporate impact?

McGee's book goes beyond the usual real-time hype. It will help executives anticipate events and changes. The result: potential disasters will be transformed into opportunities.

worth reading
What I was most impressed with about this book is that the author doesn't just preach the glories of real-time. He actually talks about what information shouldn't be real-time. In fact he says that only 5% of corporate information should be real time.

Just for that its worth reading.