ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: AME 2012 Leadership Program: New Generation
Lea Tonkin, editor in chief
Is your organization’s leadership prepared to meet future challenges in an innovative, energetic, and effective manner? Could greater leadership depth and understanding vault your company to sustained market success? Participate in the Association for Manufacturing Excellence (AME) Leadership Program to cultivate the skills and strength required in a new generation of leadership.
This intensive nine-month program is a joint AME/Arizona State University venture. It will address three critical questions:
- How do leaders sustain the gains in lean companies, and what is needed beyond the lean tools?
- What must we, as leaders, and our companies do to prepare the culture for this?
- How must I develop my personal leadership characteristics to lead my company successfully in choppy, uncharted water?
Every seasoned manager enrolling in the program will participate in a two-day capabilities assessment process that includes interviews with the company’s other senior management. The company’s current state, performance gaps, and values will be evaluated. Then strategic possibilities for the future and potential outcomes of each one will be reviewed. The participant and the management will identify a mandate for the course and target a strategic level project for the participant.
All participants will work with a lean green-belt student from Arizona State for a 10-week internship and practice mentoring the intern to implement the strategic objective. An experienced executive will mentor each participant for 30 minutes per week, serving as a sounding board for the participant’s ideas. “Stuck coaches” will be available to help with challenging issues. Participants will be coached in mentoring/coaching, considered critical for a senior executive’s success.
Throughout the program, participants will benefit from classroom sessions with exercises designed to let them actually experience issues in a lean organization facing difficult decisions. In these sessions, participants will learn about and discuss topics such as developing an organizational strategy to meet objectives, streamlining new product and process introductions, leadership tools for value creation, healthy culture, etc.
In a “capstone” presentation at the conclusion of the intern project, participants will demonstrate new leadership skills, learn leadership insights, be part of a peer network with fellow participants, and be introduced into the AME Champion’s Club. Each one receives complimentary registration for the 2012 AME annual conference in Chicago and will provide a brief recap of course learnings and experiences during the capstone session.
“If an organization is to be competitive in this new world, it must couple high flexibility for major change with ability to get it right the first time,” said Ken McGuire, director of the Leadership Program for the AME Institute. “Just making things fast, reliable, low cost, and with short leadtimes will likely be basic requirements just to survive, and not even that if competitors lead an organization to do these things better and can beat you at this game. Operational excellence may be a big achievement today, but it’s mandatory for tomorrow, and unlikely to make you stand out unless your whole organization seamlessly and routinely delivers it to your customers.”
Registration for the early 2012 program is open for a limited period. For more program details and registration, visit ame.org/institute or contact Ken McGuire at kmcguire@ame.
