The Wall Street Diet: Making Your Business Lean and Healthy

Businesses trying to stay lean and fit face the same challenges as human dieters—success requires fundamental lifestyle changes and sustained, continuing effort. And, like human dieters, businesses, too, are susceptible to the come-ons of the latest quick-fix fads, which often deliver short-term gains but fall short in the long run. Eventually they go back to their old habits and they’re right back where they started. It’s a vicious cycle.

The Wall Street Diet uses a diet metaphor to illustrate a complete, integrated approach to what every business must do to become a lean, healthy enterprise. Like a truly effective weight loss program, it is a plan for achieving sustained benefits—following the Wall Street Diet will add five to eight points of potential new profit to a business's bottom line.

Using the proven concept of total enterprise optimization (TEO) as a framework, the book introduces a fitness program that brings together lean techniques, advanced supply chain management, improved quality concepts, selective outsourcing, and a focus on both the top and bottom lines. The authors detail specific TEO efforts that add savings and create new values, demonstrating the synergy to be had by combining those efforts with improved consumption data and analysis and innovative partnering with allied businesses. Fundamentally, The Wall Street Diet is about changing the culture that drives the business, leading to better earnings, continued growth, and the greatest value for all stakeholders.

Chuck Poirier is a recognized authority on supply chain management, process improvement, e-business techniques, and collaborative use of technology around the world. He has authored or coauthored twelve business books, seven of which have been related to improving supply chain processing. His work has been translated into nine languages. He is a frequent presenter at national and international conferences and meetings. With more than forty years’ business experience, including senior-level positions, and the extensive research conducted for the writing of his many books, white papers, and position documents, Poirier is comfortable before any audience seeking help with value chain networks. He has helped firms in a variety of industries establish the framework for their supply chains and find the hidden values across the collaborative networking that can be established. His advanced techniques have become a hallmark of firms seeking the most benefits from cross-organizational collaboration.
Mike Bauer has breadth and depth that are unique in today’s compart- mentalized business world. He is a noted author and speaker, whose “hands-on” approach differentiates him from many others in the world of business and technology expertise. Bauer is characterized by tireless en- ergy, boundless curiosity, and the ability to understand how business and technology trends converge. He is as comfortable on a plant floor as he is in a board room. Bauer has spoken and written on a broad range of topics, from supply chain to lean manufacturing. He is the director of Computer Sciences Corporation’s Lean Enterprise Center and is a CSC Six Sigma champion.
Bill Houser, president of Integrated Productivity and Quality Systems, Inc., has a lengthy history helping businesses improve performance and enhance profitability. He has trained hundreds of business professionals in the principles of world-class quality and productivity. Houser has worked with more than one hundred corporations and government agen- cies in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Europe. He is the coauthor of Business Partnering for Continuous Improvement and has written numer- ous articles on quality, productivity, and cost improvement. His models for success have stood the test of time and implementation and are con- sidered valuable aids in the fight against corporate obesity.