Welcome to Topves

"Making Your Future - In Business and Private Life"

Making your plan or management system: towards a better future

My website is for you if your are:

• Interested to improve your organization or company as a manager
• Working as an internal consultant with the task to help your management
• An external consultant hired to assist your customer to reach their objective(s)
• Interested for any other reason

This website is not a training course as such and it definitely is not comprehensive on most of the subjects included. I am trying to communicated the importance of a management system in obtaining objectives that you wish to reach in your organization.

To understand my website, you may want to follow the path suggested by the boxes ("Next page") that you will find at the bottom of each page - the start of the path is on the home page.

The above principle simply means that if you do not do "anything", the future will be the same as the past. Or worse because if you don't do anything, other people will and the environment in which your organization operates will never be the same.

Peter Drucker (management consultant, educator and author, 1909 - 2005) said it this way:

I believe that the contents of my website may help you to do things better. Doing things better does not really mean doing "anything" but means "doing the right things the right way" and you must have heard that somewhere, I guess. In any case, if you wish to improve or do things in a certain way or reach certain objectives you have to undertake specific activities in a specific way.

Once you have decided you want to go somewhere or be somewhere, you probably want to know where you are but you certainly have to know where you want to go or be and what you have to do to get there. And when you are on your way, you want to establish from time to time if you are doing the right things and if you are progressing towards your goal. Basically this is simple, is it not?

Whether you have only one activity (area) or many, the activities have to be embedded in a certain structure to allow success. A structure that will "force" you - and your colleagues - to determine the "what must be done, when, by whom and how" and to periodically assess if those activities are done as they should and bring the results expected. Simple is it not?

However if you are in an organization, you have to deal with people and that may make things a bit complex. Because those other people may have other thoughts and other objectives, other priorities. They will bring in all kinds of arguments why things can not be done, or not be done THAT way. There may be limited resources to do things, external restrictions etcetera. Many things that may divert you from the objective: to make your management system work, to get results from what you are doing!

It does not matter what you want to improve:

• Safety & Health? 
• Quality? 
• Environment? 
• Cost Control? 
• Sustainable Profits? 
• Stakeholder Relations? 
• Something else? 

Whatever you want to make better, you need to undertake well identified activities that will bring you towards your objectives, you need to structure those in a certain way to make sure that those activities are done and evaluated. And you need to follow a certain process to make it all work - it does not really matter whether you are on your own or someone in an organization, the process is basically the same! But in an organization it takes more attention, more communication, more time etc. So you need to take that into account; improvement may not happen overnight or easy. But in any case it will help you if you know the basics so you will be able to see the forest where others may be too close to the trees.

Do you want to know:

• How to make your management system work? 
• What activity areas to consider? 
• How to structure those for implementation and results? 

Making Your Future in Business - The Book

The 346-page book "Making Your Future - in Business and Private Life" will provide you with guidelines how to make your management system successful. It is not a cookbook recipe for dummy's but a travel guide showing the road to go. There are no guarantees for success, there never are when you are to upgrade a company to the next performance level. The book only contains the basic ingredients - you and the people you work with will have to add the flavours and energy to make it work for you!

BE AWARE

The message that I am trying to convey to you is this: you need to focus on three items that will guide you on your way to success. But be not mistaken: no magic wand, no quick fixes! You will have to work at it and do this with others and that may make things a lot more complicated. But even if so, remember this: don't stay too close to the trees, you may not see the forest anymore! Remember to Go Back to the Basics!

What I publish on this website comes from my own experience, working in the area of safety and risk management since 1968. Please see my background for details. Obviously, you do not have to agree with my ideas but maybe they will help you to get your own ideas clearer as to how to bring improvement to your organization.

Some of the models, methods and ideas published in connection with my website are well-known in business areas such as: safety, quality, environmental, risk management. Some of the models and ideas presented through this website are my own and may be somewhat different from those that are considered common knowledge.

When I started my website in 2001, my ideas on how to make a management system work were somewhat scattered throughout. That website did not really have a focus but the ideas and tools were there, to be missed by most visitors. In 2012, I decided to restructure my website, change the layout and focus it on "Make Your Management System Work". 

The book provided through my website will guide you through the process of how to make a management system that will work. 

The essence of my website is contained in my Topves logo below. It consists of the Platform Model and the 17-step process.