Welcome

This master class is a workshop: you will get out as much as you put in. Before each afternoon, read the lessons for the blocks being covered and arrive with a case of your own in mind. Afterwards, go back to the practice exercises with your company's data.

What you will find

• Block 1. From mission to organisation: hierarchy and cross-functionality. How mission, strategy, business plan, objectives, organisation and processes link together, why structure follows strategy, and which organisation models, trends and success factors are worth knowing before you touch an organisation chart.
• Block 2. Processes, digitalisation and robotisation. How to see your company through its processes (map, owner, indicators and coordination between functions) and how to decide what to digitalise or robotise, with RPA and artificial intelligence, without computerising disorder or ignoring risk factors.
• Block 3. Management by objectives: from vision to each person. How to cascade from vision and mission down to the strategic axes, company priorities, each department's priorities and each person's objectives, and how to implement and follow up that deployment so it does not become an annual formality.
• Block 4. The five-year business plan and the dashboard. How to build a five-year business plan on explicit assumptions, how to carry it from sales through to cash and track it month by month, and what a dashboard should look like to connect each function with the control of the business.
• Block 5. Motivation, communicating the plan and remote working. What really motivates a team and what merely stops it complaining, why reporting on the progress of the business plan is a motivational lever, and how to manage remotely without losing the bond: hybrid models, team rituals and management by results.
• Block 6. Change: knowing when it is time and getting ahead of it. How to recognise in time that the company has to change, why it is best to do so while things are still going well, and how to lead change so that it does not stop at an announcement: early signals, Handy's sigmoid curve, the inertia of success and Kotter's eight steps.
• Block 7. The manager's functions: the urgent, the important and the diary. What a manager really does and what sets apart the one who is effective: Mintzberg's managerial roles, contribution, strengths and priorities according to Drucker, and the bare minimum on time and diary management so that the urgent does not eat the important.
• Block 8. Company success factors: delegation and empowerment. The factors that decide whether a company works —customer, shared strategy, people, cash, execution and coordination— and the lever that sustains them as the company grows: delegating by levels and giving the team what it needs to decide. It closes with the map of factors by department.

How you will work

Each lesson opens with a short introduction and, below it, several pills: short pieces that explain a single idea and end with a case or something to do. Read them in order the first time; afterwards you can go back to the one you need.

Where you see an interactive practice, do it before reading on: it is there for you to decide, calculate or classify, and the explanation comes afterwards. It does not save what you write, so copy whatever you want to keep.

Each block ends with an exam of six questions. All the answers come with a comment, including the wrong ones: failing and reading why is part of the method.

At The Singular Academy you learn by solving real cases. If at the end of a lesson you do not know what you would do differently tomorrow, go back over it.