Creating Value: Empowering People for Sustainable Success that Benefits Employees, Customers, and Owners

Guide to create unlimited value in any organization, supported by rich, granular company stories

Drawing from real stories of how companies relentlessly improved quality, delivery, service, and cost structure, Creating Value: Empowering People for Sustainable Success that Benefits Employees, Customers, and Owners offers simple, powerful ways to think and act to unlock the nascent value of any enterprise. This book shares a dynamic business system that, when practiced authentically, taps into a more focused and productive organization to deliver superior value to customers in a way that improves consistently over time. Author John Rizzo draws from 30 years of leading successful business transformations in a wide range of industries. His approach, which creates sustainable success by empowering people to improve processes continuously, features the following principles:

• Apply a Holistic Business System: Develop a complete framework that integrates strategy deployment, value stream analysis, workshops, and management systems
• Prioritize People Development: Employ techniques that tap the wisdom of those who do the work―the true source of sustainable improvement
• Learning as the Foundation: Discover how hands-on improvement creates deeper understanding and represents the most fundamental type of continuous improvement
• Produce Quality at the Source: Build excellence into processes rather than inspecting for it afterward
• Leverage the Compounding Power of Improvement: Realize the power of small improvements accumulating into breakthrough performance

Creating Value reveals how pursuing excellence leads to outstanding results that endure over years. It is an essential resource for business leaders to dramatically boost employee participation and agency, while steadily increasing profits and boosting enterprise value leading to widely shared creation of value.

JOHN RIZZO has led transformational change at companies including Basin Holdings, Talus Holdings, Crouse-Hinds, and McQuay International, creating billions in value across manufacturing, healthcare, retail, and nonprofit sectors. Through working with 1,000+ teams at 50+ organizations he has proven that sustainable success comes from being present where work happens, listening to those who do it, and developing people at all levels. His approach, refined through learning from Toyota and continuous improvement pioneers demonstrates that engaging frontline workers creates value that top-down management cannot match.

TOM EHRENFELD is a freelance journalist and editorial consultant whose books include The Gold Mine, Lead With Respect, Managing to Learn, and The Lean Strategy. Eleven books that he has edited have won the Shingo Award for Editorial Excellence.