Reversing the Culture of Waste – 50 Best Practices for Achieving Process Excellence
2 min read
Many enterprise-wide improvement efforts are disappointing and short-lived. Reversing the Culture of Waste is a new approach being used around the world that fundamentally changes our attitudes toward processes and the products and services they so fundamentally affect.
Lee Pollock and Mark Kiemele present 50 specific, self-defining and actionable “Best Practices” derived from their implementation in over 500 enterprises having annual revenues of between $75M and $56B in manufacturing, financial services, energy and transportation, healthcare and biotech, professional and administrative services, information systems and technology, retail operations, and government. Taken together, the 50 Best Practices provide a “recipe” to achieve a more successful, sustainable enterprise even under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Each of the 50 Best Practices is aligned with one of ten categories:
- Executive Ownership and Leadership Alignment
- Effective Support Infrastructure
- Integration With Existing Business Improvement Initiatives
- Commissioning the Right Projects and People to Lead Them
- Integrated Training and Software
- Financial and Implementation Accountability
- Reward and Recognition
- Enterprise-Wide Knowledge Sharing
- Customer and Supply Chain Involvement
- Change Management
Readers are encouraged to score their organization’s performance on each of the 50 Best Practices, sum these scores, and compare that sum to similarly rated sums from 545 other organizations. The reader will be able to determine the percentile ranking of his or her organization compared to the other 545 in the following five areas: Customer Value, Intellectual Capital, Bottom-Line Growth, Top-Line Growth, and Culture Change.
Rather than investing time creating new and rigid improvement plans or endeavoring to re-invigorate an existing one, leaders, decision-makers, and practitioners can use the 50 Best Practices to take immediate action to help them fight the legitimized waste in their organizations. There is no reason to re-invent the process when there are already substantial lessons learned from the continuous improvement community.
