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Wednesday, June 27, 2007

What Is Business Excellence?

People disagree on what excellence means, but most everyone agrees that the journey toward business excellence is a never-ending pursuit in a world of increasing challenges.

While every organization's situation is different, the most frequent challenges mentioned by CEOs include:
  • Accountability -- things that should get done, don’t get done
  • Engagement -- people don’t seem to care as much
  • Direction – focus and direction is unclear
  • Focus – opportunities, options and choices are overwhelming
  • Leadership - transitioning to the next generation of leaders is needed
  • Control - things “feel” out of synch
  • Quality – product and service levels are diminishing
  • Alignment - people aren’t on the same page
  • Frustration - we can do better

At Six Disciplines, we help company leadership realize that their particular challenge at the moment is a symptom of a deeper need that all growing organizations have: the need to systematically improve the organization’s ability to manage their next challenge.

A business excellence program provides a predictable way to increase an organization’s ability to execute in an unpredictable business environment. It would make sense that if business excellence requires a never-ending pursuit, a business excellence program must be able to grow an organization’s capability to execute -- and it must do so in an enduring way.

The problem with most business improvement efforts is, for one reason or another, they don’t last.

What makes Six Disciplines different is that it is totally optimized to be embraced by an organization in a long-term, sustainable way.

BOTTOMLINE: Six Disciplines is the first enduring business excellence program. It includes a holistic approach toward strategy, planning, organizing people and processes, and execution management. Simply put, Six Disciplines transforms SMB organizations into ones that continually grow in their understanding of how to plan AND execute better.

From our field research, we learned that an enduring Business Excellence Program must have the following four elements:

  1. A repeatable Methodology to drive organization learning
  2. External Coaching for accountability
  3. A System to align the activities of every team member, every day
  4. A Community of like-minded people to accelerate learning

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