The Organisational Excellence Handbook
This Organisational Excellence Handbook encapsulates a wealth of experience, combining industrial experience and academia. This book is an essential addition to the toolkit of any professional in the continuous improvement (CI) field or any professional looking to enter the field.
The Organisational Excellence Handbook
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Old Testament
There is nothing new under the sun. This is especially true when it comes to business or organisational work: management, leadership, systems, performance, change and transformation. I’ve been saying this for years and have spent a lot of money and time reading books and attending seminars and courses searching for the silver bullet or the holy grail of management and leadership just to prove this point.
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In today's ever-changing business world with inflation and economic downturn, product or service competitiveness, global markets, supply chain security, increasing customer expectations, employee retention and turnover, digital and artificial intelligence transformations, and environmental sustainability. It is vital that in order to survive, business and organisational managers and leaders must understand these challenges and what they can do to stay ahead of them.
In my opinion, management and leadership books are now on par with diet books, and a recent search on the web shows how they are coming together. A great example of this is the book The Wall Street Diet - Making Your Business Lean and Healthy. This is just one example where the authors claim that their book can help you change your business lifestyle, eliminate the fat, and tighten the bottom line. While all this may be achievable, how many organisations will sustain these benefits?
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Like the diet industry, where research shows that 80% of dieters fail to sustain weight loss and as much as 95% regain the weight lost within two years, these very same statistics can be applied to businesses, where research has identified that 80% of change fails, 74% of business transformations fail, and as a rule of thumb, 95% of lean implementations fail to sustain.
So, what must we do?
Of course, there is no one answer. However, from my 40 years of experience in management and leadership, one key factor is learning from past thought leaders and innovators and reflecting on, or applying what we call “lessons learned,” from your own experiences. This means that managers and leaders must be prepared to learn and adapt their way of thinking and to create a learning environment where everyone is engaged and has an opportunity to achieve their full potential.
The purpose of this book is not to tell you what to do or how to do it, but rather to bring together those great thought leaders and innovators from our past and present. To share their knowledge, insights and experiences that may help
students, frontline supervisors, managers and leaders better understand the various principles, models, systems, tools, and techniques that you may be able to adopt and or adapt to suite your specific challenges and help enable you to create sustainable business or organisational improvements or transformations.
