John Bernard, Founder Of Mass Ingenuity, Shows How To Beat The Competition By Empowering Every Employee To Seize Every Opportunity, Every Time 

His Game-Changing Book, BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW, Rewrites The Rules of Leadership And Management

“In the new world of mass customization, businesses must act more quickly than ever – or run the risk of getting crushed by more nimble competitors. To achieve this, every employee – no matter what level or role – must be empowered to seize every opportunity, every time,” argues John Bernard, Chairman and Founder of Mass Ingenuity. In his thought-provoking new book, BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW: Fire Up Your People, Thrill Your Customers, and Crush Your Competitors (Wiley, December 2011), Bernard reveals how organizations can give everyone, from front-line workers to top managers, the tools and initiative to move faster and compete more effectively in today’s super-charged, global economy. This game-changing book challenges current management practices and rewrites the rules of leadership forever.

According to Bernard, at the crux of so many business struggles is the fact that current management methods have not kept pace with the tectonic economic shift from mass production to mass customization. In all too many companies, there is a major disconnect between what employees are expected to deliver and the behaviors management encourages, by unconsciously relying on practices dating from the days of Henry Ford. These practices stifle creativity and discourage employee autonomy.

In BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW, Bernard presents his ground-breaking NOW Management System which gives employees the skills, confidence, and permission required to deal with issues at the point of need – whether reducing the rate of product defects, ordering a critical piece of equipment, boosting cooperation within a contentious team, or responding to a complaint. At its heart, Bernard’s innovative methods eliminate fear in the workplace; ensure consistent approaches to critical processes such as idea development and customer service; and attack the rules, policies, and beliefs that hamper business growth. The NOW Management System, allows companies to:

• Achieve complete transparency of key goals, core processes, and metrics for all routine work
• Ensure that employees skillfully implement improvements, on their own initiative and without seeking permission – so good ideas don’t get mired down in red tape
• Drive breakthroughs in execution by improving performance and developing new capabilities
• Provide managers with accurate and timely data to enable better decision-making
• Increase employee accountability and engagement

With dozens of examples, anecdotes, and step-by-step guidelines, BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW lays out how to put the NOW Management System in place within any organization. Throughout the book, Bernard underlines the importance of leveraging three game changing forces: social media, cloud computing, and the millennial mindset. He examines the best ways to harness these forces, and is adamant that leaders must eliminate such tired policies as prohibiting the use of social media in the workplace, and overcome their fears about the security of storing company information on the web.

“While the world of organizational life today may seem bafflingly complex, in many ways the more complex it gets, the simpler it gets,” writes Bernard. “Rather than trying to micromanage all the countless variables you cannot control, you need only manage the one you can control: the people who work in your organization who can come up with the ideas that cumulatively will create and sustain your competitive advantage.”

BUSINESS AT THE SPEED OF NOW provides the cutting edge insights needed to achieve the high level of mass action and mass engagement that can usher in a new era of customer satisfaction, innovation, and profits. As Teresa Roche, Chief Learning Officer of Agilent Technologies, says, “This book connects many dots from the past and present with the future and simplifies what can appear daunting and complex for today’s leaders . . . Thank you John for being a GPS in today’s highly evolving environment.”