Why Do Most Companies Fail When They Strive to Become More Efficient and Resilient?

At the beginning of this month, Brian Strobel published an intriguing new book entitled Pursuing Excellence: A Values-Based, Systems Approach to Help Companies Become More Resilient, which interestingly posits that a company doesn’t implement Operational Excellence as a methodology, model, or tool. Instead, a company realizes Operational Excellence. It does so by integrating effective leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, systems thinking, and continuous improvement. It achieves this by aligning strategies, empowering employees, optimizing business processes, and improving the customer experience.

When I spoke with Brian recently, I asked him: “Why do most companies fail when they strive to become more efficient and resilient?” Here is his full answer:

I think the fact that people are starting to ask questions like this proves there’s a growing recognition our previous ways of doing things aren’t working.

The way that we’ve managed our companies has remained largely unchanged since the 18^th century. Since then, different philosophies have come and gone, but the central ideas for what it takes to manage our companies have remained fairly consistent.

And our approach to achieve continuous improvement must also change.

I believe that our legacy approaches to continuous improvement, to include Lean and Six Sigma, are failing to consider the whole system and account for the leadership principles necessary for success. These previous methods placed too much emphasis on the specific improvement methodology, without proper consideration for the entire system and surrounding culture, systems and structures, values and beliefs, and the particulars of our marketspace..

As I write in my latest book Pursuing Excellence, “our companies are struggling with ways to become more competitive, to reduce costs, and the chase unobtanium in their never-ending pursuit to do more with less. But to survive, this focus on efficiency must not come at the expense of innovation, agility, and moving fast."

The world is now a new place, with new rules. Succeeding will require new ways of looking at our problems. And the lens of operational excellence can help us view these things from a different perspective.

A lens is something that bends and refracts light to alter our vision. It allows us to see things differently. The right kind of lens takes what’s already there, and through convergence and divergence, provides a different perspective to view the subject. It focuses our vision on those things we need to see with more clarity.

These ideas that make up the lens of operational excellence, as shown here, provide us the context for what must be considered as we move towards driving change with a fundamental understanding that we must have everyone aware of why we need to change. In this regard, the lens helps guide the vision for our companies to become more resilient and move closer to achieving excellence.

What do you think of Brian's thoughts? How have continuous-improvement initiatives affected your company? 

The "Blendification" of Your Organization's Culture, Strategy, and Execution

Early in June, Dan Bruder published an exciting new book entitled, The Blendification System: Activating Potential by Connecting Culture, Strategy, and Execution. By focusing on the unifying purpose within each organization, this book promotes alignment between leadership and employees setting a clear, strong foundation in which every individual can thrive.

During a recent conversation with Dan, I asked him a series of questions about the book and the connection between employees, customers, and communities. Here are the important questions followed by Dan's answers:

“What is the connection between culture, strategy, and execution and why are most companies not embracing it?”

Companies are at the forefront of fostering growth within society and communities. In the US, adults spend over 50% of their waking time in work- or work-related activities.  Work is where people come together on a regular basis with the primary purpose of identifying and satisfying society’s needs.  For companies to realize their potential, they must break away from the model of oversimplification and internal silos. Human beings can accomplish tremendous outcomes when motivated, challenged, and connected.  Unfortunately, business has diminished employee motivation by relegating people to functional silos and meaningless task-oriented behaviors.

"Why aren’t companies embracing the connection between culture, strategy, and execution?"

There are three primary components that are critical for organizations to realize their potential.  They are culture, strategy, and execution.  Historically, there has been little intentionality around designing an exceptional culture while strategy has been something the executive elite do every year or two and it typically is not cascaded through the organization.  Similarly, execution has not been embedded in the culture or aligned with the strategy and employees do not see how their jobs make a difference. Generally, there has been little focus on deliberately designing culture, strategy, and execution as a connected system where each complement and complete the other.  This is primarily related to executive leaders and founders not fully grasping the potential of a united team and their ability to truly make a difference.  Essentially, it is easier to pursue profit than potential.

"Why should companies embrace the connection between culture, strategy, and execution?"

Culture, strategy, and execution are seamlessly designed and implemented together in The Blendification® System.   When these three business components are purposefully created and connected, companies experience substantial growth in engagement, innovation, and outcomes.  As the entire company aligns on a common cultural cause, the strategic platform becomes the path for employees to realize their human potential.  Finally, the execution of the strategic platform enables employees to align their work with making a positive impact on their communities.  Thus, the systematic blending of culture, strategy, and execution enables companies to be at the forefront of advancing society through their employees, customers, and communities.

What do you think of Dan's ideas? Does your company suffer from disconnects among the culture, strategy, and execution platform? 

What New Engineers Should Know About Problem Solving

Melisa Buie, the director of operations at Coherent Inc., published a very helpful book for new engineers just entering the workforce entitled Problem Solving for New Engineers: What Every Engineering Manager Wants You to Know. The book focuses on developing a strategy for minimizing, eliminating, and finally controlling variation.

During a recent conversation with Melisa, I asked her: “What hinders new engineers most regarding problem solving?” Here is her complete response:

Problem solving requires a paradigm shift for most scientists and engineers when they transition from the academic world of memorization, retention, and recitation of knowledge to a creative more fluid kind of thinking. From our pre-kindergarten interactions to the day we graduate with a BS or MS degree, we are taught that knowledge rules. Knowledge is the most important thing. In school, the person who knows the most wins or gets the ‘A.' We are taught that knowing is the most important thing. Knowing is valued most.

In school, that knowledge is gained from our books, from our professors, experts, or journals. We participate in science through demonstrations and labs, both of which are scripted with known results. We are told when to watch, when to pay attention, and when to record our findings. These experiments are then recorded in nice packages called lab reports and graded. Our grades are determined by the care we take in recording our findings in the templates provided. Our labs are recipes that we follow.

Helen Keller wrote: “The more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world.” Problem solving is about handling things and gaining kinship with the world. Problem solving is about discovery and creativity. The sooner we can flip the switch from being told something to figuring it out for ourselves -- discovering for ourselves -- the sooner we begin to really enjoy science and engineering.

Don’t get me wrong, knowing is important but equally important, after graduation and joining the workforce, is gaining confidence with handling things. The nice thing is that we don’t have to give up our quest for knowledge -- if we make the leap to discovery, we begin to experience discovering for ourselves. 

For the engineers reading this post: What hindered or helped your problem-solving skills when you entered the workforce?