Cover Story
32 best management ideas
Smart Business Philadelphia | December 2008
Page 5 of 5
Make a case for change
Bill Yoh, president and CEO, Yoh Services LLC
To blaze a new trail, you need trailblazers.
That’s why, as he formulated Yoh
Services LLC’s go-forward plan, President
and CEO Bill Yoh wanted to get the company’s best and brightest involved from
the outset.
Over the span of months, Yoh gathered
between 80 and 90 of his company’s top
performers together for a series of workshops aimed at identifying new potential
paths for the company.
“We wanted to ask them, when you
think of the most-admired companies,
who do you think about?” he says. “What
are some of the best practices you have
encountered in your career that could be
beneficial here at Yoh?”
The information gathered in those meeting was then distilled down to help form the company’s new operating model and
go-to-market strategy.
Yoh says getting employees involved in
forming your company’s new strategy is
an essential first step in achieving long-term buy-in.
“The beauty of that was it was kind of
developed by the people, for the people.,”
he says. “It facilitated the buy-in for the
new way we were going. The people who
participated, you could see their fingerprints on a lot of the outcomes.
“What also happened was we were able
to define a succinct way of doing things,
enabling people to jump to one side of
the fence or the other, to come along
with the new strategy or to part ways
because they didn’t agree with the
direction we were going in.”
