Patterns of Excellence - Softcover

Samson, Danny; Challis, David.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0273638769 ISBN 13: 9780273638766

Publisher: FT Press, 1999

Synopsis

Patterns of Excellence: The New Principles of Corporate Success

About this title

About the Author

Danny Samson has been a professor of management at the University of Melbourne, Australia for the past decade, with prior appointments at the Universities of Illinois and New South Wales. His career began as a chemical engineer with ICI, followed by a PhD in management. He has written five books and over 50 scholarly articles on management. He is a company director and regularly consults to businesses in a variety of industries in Asia, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and the USA on strategy, operations improvement, organizational change, business excellence and improvement, and the achievement of the business principles outlined in this book. He is an outstanding executive educator and conducts regular executive education programs for companies wishing to transform themselves using these principles. His clients over the past decade have included a global financial services organization and major corporations in the oil, plastics, building, automotive, textiles and consumer goods industries. He has worked on numerous high-level government inquiries in the fields of technology management, manufacturing management, leadership, industry competitiveness, and market policy and restructuring.

David Challis has spent the last 20 years consulting to organizations in Europe, the USA, Australia and Asia in the area of strategic organizational change. He has worked at all organizational levels: board through middle management through shop floor and has an outstanding track record as an effective change agent. He has extensive consulting experience in assisting executives in many different businesses to assess business health and organizational effectiveness and then transform their operations utilizing a broad range of processes and models, including those described in this book. David has also facilitated the introduction of many different consulting interventions including strategic repositioning, work and process redesign, capability assessment, leadership and team development, continuous improvement, change planning and culture change. He has also been a member of numerous taskforces in areas concerned with industry competitiveness, technological innovation, manufacturing excellence and workplace reform. David holds bachelor's and master's degrees in Engineering and a PhD in management.

From the Back Cover

In an increasingly competitive and complex environment, many businesses today are struggling to achieve sustainable success. So what can organizations do to put excellence back at the heart of the business?

Based on a global study of the world's best organizations, Patterns of Excellence reveals the guiding principles which separate the best from the rest. The book's case studies provide illuminating analysis and practical guidance on implementing management structures.

Samson and Challis cut through the fads and jargon of modern business and systematically identify the fundamental building blocks underpinning the world's leading companies. They characterize fourteen distinguishing principles of organizational excellence, enabling readers to identify and mobilize the perfect pattern for business.

Patterns of Excellence presents a blueprint for success which can be adapted to any organization.

Based on extensive analysis of worldwide excellence in performance, this highly accessible book reinforces theory with practical examples.

Samson and Challis reveal the patterns of excellence which connect the operations of the world's best organizations, and demonstrate how to mould these defining principles into a structured framework and management approach.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Preface

Let's face it. For many of us, our organizations are not as well organized as we would like. For most companies, there is lots of room for improvement. We do not see this as any criticism or negative factor, but as a major challenge and opportunity for further and future wealth creation.

If one considers return on investment, there is a large variance between the best and the rest in any industry. Why have so many companies failed to achieve their maximum potential? A major cause is the lack of systematic and holistic vision and connection right across the company. By this, we mean that the business strategy, operational actions, management of performance and rewards for employees are not fully aligned. All companies set strategy, have operations and processes, measure their outputs and reward their people, but for mediocre companies it seems that these four activities are done in a vacuum, or—more to the point —in four separate vacuums.

We see the world's best companies as having achieved a powerful linking up of these four critical factors—strategy, actions, consequences and rewards. When these excellent companies choose a path or change initiative it works and it sticks. Lesser companies are constantly searching for solutions to their problems. In many cases, they have tried many or all of the populist fads and management initiatives proposed by our academic colleagues and a slew of consultants. These companies then become cynical within themselves and over the past decade we have seen them resort repeatedly to the only sure-fire way of increasing their competitiveness, which is cost-cutting. This can be a fine practice, for again, who is going to argue against being lean, but what happens after all the fat is cut away and the only things left to cut are actually the muscle and bones of the organization? Cost cutting can be successfully mandated and achieved in even a mediocre organization, but it is the other value-creating changes that go differently in the excellent and poorly led companies. It is in areas such as time compression, service and quality improvement, new product development, waste elimination and delivery reliability that we see the excellent companies making real progress and the others in the pack being backward.

Through first-hand experience, we know how difficult these initiatives are to implement in these 'ordinary' companies. We believe that the fundamental reason for this is a lack of basic connections between longer-term strategy, shorter-term action plans, performance and rewards. For example, consider one of the major improvement initiatives of the late decade, total quality management. The basic ideas of total quality are very sensible. Who can argue against improved customer focus, stronger leadership and vision, better employee involvement and stronger measurement, control and stability of operational processes? So why has total quality had such a mixed record ranging from startling successes to dismal failure? Why did companies like Xerox and Harley Davidson achieve fabulous turnarounds based on total quality while others failed completely? There must be something else even more fundamental than the elements of total quality which needs to be in place first in order to make it work. Our first objective in this book is to articulate these fundamentals. The same applies to improvement attempts in the areas of re-engineering, benchmarking, process redesign, team building, culture change, employee participation, innovation, customer service, supplier management, production scheduling, segmentation, brand repositioning, ... you name it.

The second major objective of this book is to articulate how these connections between strategy, actions, outcomes and rewards are achieved. We have observed that ordinary companies lack a unifying set of central principles that are the foundations of all aspects of their behavior, but that great companies have these in place. The closest human characteristic we can ascribe to this is that ordinary companies have no apparent "soul" or "heart." Specifically, let's consider the following factors that characterize companies which we call "ordinary" in terms of whether a company is mature in its position and achievements. "Ordinary" companies are characterized by a number of traits:

• A lack of alignment between employee behaviors and company values and direction.
• People at all levels not taking full responsibility for actions and the organization not having clear accountability for its performance, particularly its failed projects.
• Work being organized and done in functional hierarchies and not within value-creating processes.
• Being a lagger, not a leader, in setting industry standards and practices.
• Not having the highest standards of integrity and openness.
• Inability to balance short-term and medium-term issues and requirements.
• Not managing time as a critical resource and organizational value.
• Generally being poor at implementation and, as a result, experiencing slippage and poor effectiveness in change initiatives.
• Not having everyone excited by their personal development and learning experiences.
• Being "undisciplined" in terms of procedures, standards and work processes.
• Failure to provide all employees with timely, effective information about their work performance.
• Not having all employees focused on creating customer value.
• Having no explicit notion of what its key capabilities are, hence not having a plan for developing and exploiting these.
• Poor connection in employees' minds between individual contribution and organizational success.

Imagine trying to implement even a conceptually sound approach, such as total quality, in a company that scores poorly on the criteria above. Would it catch hold, stick and make a difference? .

We believe that these are some of the deeper questions that executives should be asking, and these questions clearly raise issues about the fundamental building blocks and connections that are needed in a company on which specific change interventions can be based. Hence our second objective is to convince readers to accept, and act on, basing their organization's future on a set of axiomatic principles, which we have observed are the distinguishing features of the world's best companies. We have deduced these from close study of hundreds of companies all around the world in every conceivable sector and industry. We have organized the book into three parts:

• Part 1 amplifies the ideas above and demonstrates that these ideas are little more than applied common sense within a disciplined, structured framework. The hard part is implementation. By the end of Chapter 1, the need for fundamental, enduring systems will be established and their role as behavioral guides established. In the rest of Part 1 a systematic approach and the need for a set of principles are developed and illustrated.
• Part 2 sets out the 14 principles that we have observed as common to world-class companies. Each of these is developed and illustrated as a guide to action. Part 2 brings together the systematic approach to management that aims to connect strategy, actions, performance and rewards, all guided by a set of underlying principles.
• Part 3 is focused on implementation. Whereas Parts 1 and 2 elaborate on what drives the world's best companies, Part 3 describes how to proceed as the best do. It also provides a set of key success factors for moving into implementation, and making the transition from an ad hoc approach to management and business improvement, into a systematic and "principles driven" mode.

Finally, we have written this book for practicing managers and executives with the intent of keeping the "theoretical foundations" to a minimum. We have extensively reviewed the existing knowledge base of the relevant fields of general management and field tested our work empirically. Interested readers can access this material at the web site www.excellentpatterns.com

Edition details

• Publisher: FT Press
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0273638769
• ISBN 13: 9780273638766
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272