ABOUT US
WHO WE ARE
Yost & Associates is an organizational consulting firm that offers unique organization capability development and performance improvement services. It was founded in 1994 by Brian Yost, who had formerly played a number of internal consulting and executive roles, including Vice President and Corporate Director, at several leading companies, including Xerox, TransAmerica, Atlantic Richfield (now BP), Crocker Bank (now Wells Fargo) and Crown Zellerbach (now GP).
Since its inception, Yost & Associates has tended to focus on large-scale, long-term change initiatives, and has enabled many organizations to make rapid and dramatic improvements in organizing, operating and business effectiveness.
We work in partnership with a number of other leading consulting firms. In addition, we are supported by a network of senior consultants having mastery of Yost & Associates methodologies and/or complementary methodologies.
What Makes Us Unique
1. A track record few can match
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Few we know of can match what we have enabled clients to accomplish, including transformational turnarounds of six Fortune 500 businesses or corporations, and over 20 breakthrough/”impossible” improvements, at all levels of system.
2. Depth and breadth of experience
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We have worked for decades at the cutting edge of the field, on a comprehensive array of performance improvement initiatives (e.g., organization transformation, reengineering, process improvement, culture change, leadership development, change management) succeeding in a dozen different industries, around the world.
3. Methodologies
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Our core methodology, Intentional Systems Transformation (IST), was described by one ASTD-sponsored researcher, after an exhaustive search of the field, as "...the most comprehensive, deepest, richest body of technology for supporting large systems change work that I have found."
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Independent researchers have found IST to produce business results 10X that of other methods
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Thought leaders like Rosabeth Moss Kanter and Rebecca Henderson of Harvard have called IST users models of "the organization of the future"
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We were founding members of the International Center for Organization Design, whose mission was to find, evolve and integrate the best of the best performance improvement methodologies. As a result of this partnership, we have continually added the most effective methods to our approach.
4. Focus
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We aim to enable clients to out-think and out-perform the competition through developing advanced thinking capability – the ability to think more consciously, critically, creatively, strategically and systemically
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We aim to create world class, ultra-high performance, long-lasting, responsible organizations by guiding the redesign of the essential elements of their organizational architecture
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We aim to enable clients to create work environments with the highest quality of work life anywhere.
5. Underlying paradigm
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While we have retained what will continue to work from the previous organizational paradigms, we have moved on to the Strategic Self-Management paradigm, which holds that the typical employee is not only responsible and committed , but is capable of being a businessperson, understanding the business, its value chain and strategy, and the science underlying the work, thriving on change, and developing innovations that evolve the organization and provide competitive advantage.