Cognitive Diversity for Better Management

What can your managers accomplish with Whole Brain® Thinking?

Build a forest of stronger trees

Create a more inclusive culture to generate greater value

Diagnose the cognitive diversity gaps that create productivity shortfalls
Build "diverse by design" teams for maximum results
Make cultural initiatives stickier and more inclusive to have a lasting impact

Trying to deliver breakthrough business results with a homogenous team is like rowing a boat with a single oar. Our extensive research and years of experience (not to mention numerous academic studies) have proven this. Yet, the perception of cultural initiatives as difficult to measure and lacking demonstrable business value persists. As such, these initiatives remain under-leveraged as a source of true value creation, from higher productivity and innovation, to improved employee engagement and reduced turnover.

Herrmann’s Inclusive Culture Suite provides management professionals the applications they need to make the business case for diversity and deliver more value as a direct function of diverse teams, while deepening engagement for individual employees.

Featured Case Study

Caesars Entertainment

Caesars Entertainment in Las Vegas, Nevada came to Herrmann affirming their desire, as CEO Gary Loveman put it: to be “a place where people feel as if they have made themselves better through their very associate with the company.” Using the Inclusive Culture Suite, the firm was able to increase employee engagement and drive increases in productivity for diverse teams above homogenous teams enough to sustain a positive ROI for the life of the program.

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SEED THE FUTURE

More effective management, more effective teams

Improve communication and collaboration
Reduce conflict and groupthink
Harness latent productivity in diverse teams
Optimize internal workflows to reflect diverse thinking

Ineffective managers are never as obvious as you might hope. They aren't “horrible boss” caricatures; many ineffective managers try in earnest to lead their teams to greatness. The challenge is that most managers become managers in the first place by demonstrating functional proficiency. That proficiency doesn't provide them with the skills they need to manage a team of people who may think differently than they do.

Herrmann’s Effective Manager Suite is designed for new and seasoned management professionals to become their best and build their best teams so that they become the leaders your organization needs for tomorrow.

FEATURED CASE STUDY

US Forest Service

When your job is wilderness safety and fighting wildfires, team effectiveness can be the difference between life and death. To that end, the US Forest Service practices team effectiveness as often as they can. When they reached a team performance impasse they turned to Herrmann and the Effective Manager Suite. The Forest Service was able to demonstrate a 3X improvement in solving complex challenges for time, in practice environments. Moving their results to the field showed a sustained 65% improvement in emergency responses and outcomes. The US Forest Service saved more lives, more often as a direct result of working with Herrmann.

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Branch Out

Increased agility for innovation

Build a more inclusive, innovative culture
Empower managers to see hidden innovation talent pools
Repeatable capabilities to accelerate innovation processes

Large firms are not built to innovate. In fact, they are optimized against innovation and towards optimization of the processes that established their success in the first place. However, as markets shift and disruptors arise, innovation is the only safeguard against an unpredictable future.

Herrmann’s Innovation Suite creates a culture that encourages the full breadth of innovation across an organization. Our focus is on empowering the diversity of thinking that generates truly successful innovations: it isn't just about thinking up brilliant new ideas -- it is about deep empathy for customers, removing process bottlenecks, and creating a business model that captures the newly created value.

We focus on developing sustainable internal capabilities, and empowering managers with the insights to unlock diverse hidden innovative talent pools within themselves and their teams.

Featured Case Study

Microsoft

Microsoft’s Xbox product line arguably redefined the gaming experience for tens of millions of users worldwide and solidified the company’s place in the console gaming market. However, as competitors began to probe the market’s edges for expansion into novice gamer territory, Microsoft knew it had to innovate. Enter Microsoft Kinect - a console gaming experience with zero learning curve, suitable for anyone and everyone.

To design, test, and launch Kinect the team at Microsoft relied on Herrmann’s Innovation Suite to accelerate their innovation processes and create a common language for the different roles in innovation. The resulting product would go on to generate $1 billion in profits, outsell the iPad as the fastest-selling consumer electronics item and, ultimately, help ignite the spark of innovation that would break Microsoft’s 13-year share price stagnation.

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SUSTAINABLE TRANSFORMATION

Accelerate change with better thinking

Optimize mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations, and other large-scale change initiatives
Integrate teams and organizations more effectively
Reduce talent uncertainty and turnover
Achieve those oft-heralded, rarely-realized "synergies"

Re-orgs and M&A remain a fact of corporate life despite 80% of change initiatives failing to add value years after closing. The biggest driver of failure? The needs of the people being impacted by the change weren't taken into account.

Herrmann’s Change Suite provides management professionals with powerful tools to make integration work for the diversity of thinkers across their organization, reducing talent churn and accelerating growth as a result.

Featured Case Study

Kraft

In one of the most publicly contested corporate actions, Kraft made a $19 billion bid for the 186-year-old British confectioner Cadbury in 2010. The press immediately lambasted the proposed acquisition. Workers marched in the streets. 70% of Cadbury management quit in protest. From the outset, this acquisition seemed doomed to fail.

Herrmann was brought in to help "right the ship," enabling managers of the combined organization to improve how their teams adapted to change. Herrmann helped build Kraft's integration capabilities by training hundreds of internal change agents to use our platform, content, and tools to empower thousands of managers to harness the diversity of thought of more than 140,000 global employees.

After 18 months of using Herrmann's applications, Kraft stock was up 40%, synergies had been realized, and the Cadbury and Kraft teams were working well as a single integrated organization. The repeatable capabilities and tools provided by Herrmann created such an enduring impact that years later they became an integral component of a $22 billion value creation event, the spin-off of Mondelez.

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