Five Pillars of Organizational Excellence

H. James Harrington, CEO of the Harrington Institute Inc., offers his insights into what it takes to achieve organizational excellence:

Pillar 1: process management
Pillar 2: project management
Pillar 3: change management
Pillar 4: knowledge management
Pillar 5: resource management

According to Harrington, common threads that run across all five pillars must be managed to achieve excellence:

• Communication
• Teamwork
• Empowerment
• Respect
• Honesty
• Leadership
• Quality
• Fairness
• Technology

BOTTOMLINE: "To become an excellent organization, each of these resources needs to be managed in its own special way. The big question is, "How do you pull all these different activities and improvement approaches together and prioritize them?" To solve this question, you must have a very thorough, total-involvement approach to strategic planning--one that involves everyone, from the chairman of the board to the janitor, from sales to personnel, from development engineering to maintenance. This is a total-involvement approach to strategic planning; it is both bottom up and top down. A total strategic planning process (i.e., a business plan) includes directions, expectations and actions."

Hmmm....sounds like......Six Disciplines?