The Six Disciplines Blog

On the National Baldrige Performance Excellence website, there's a great article entitled "Why Take The Baldrige Journey?"

Organizations everywhere are looking for ways to effectively and efficiently meet their missions and achieve their visions. Thousands of organizations use the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence to guide their enterprises, improve performance, and get sustainable results. This proven improvement and innovation framework offers your organization an integrated approach to key management areas:

• Leadership
• Strategic planning
• Customer focus
• Measurement, analysis, and knowledge management
• Workforce focus
• Operations focus
  
• Results
  
  

Improve Your Performance

The Baldrige Criteria can be adapted to fit your unique challenges and culture and help you evaluate performance, assess where improvements or innovation are most needed, and get results. By taking the Baldrige journey, you become part of a national effort to improve America’s performance and its competitive standing in the world. You can be proud to know that your employees, customers, board members, and other stakeholders are all better off—and that America is better off.

BOTTOMLINE:   Need help implementing Baldrige criteria in your organization? Six Disciplines helps organizations implement Baldrige - faster.  Watch this short video  and contact Six Disciplines today. 

Those who have worked both in small and large organizations have a much better appreciation for how fundamentally different large companies are from small ones. Each has its strengths, and the savvy small business owner understands what those are and takes advantage of them aggressively. They include:

1. Connecting People to Purpose

People are creatures of emotion and reason. The best performers want to belong to an organization that’s on a mission, and they need to see how they’re contributing to that mission. Small businesses have an enormous advantage in their ability to help people connect to the purpose of the organization, AND enable them to see that what they’re doing is contributing to that purpose in a meaningful way.

This importance was hammered home to me in a lunch meeting with “Sandy,” who recently moved to a much larger organization. She commented, “It’s just not the same. I feel like a number. It seems like nothing I do will make a real difference in anything. And if it did, it probably wouldn't be noticed.”

Another businessman understood how to use this advantage. He set up a 50% profit-sharing program in which a portion of the profits was retained by the employees themselves and the remainder was given away by the employees to charitable causes. This small team was one of the most productive, spirited and lively groups I've ever known.

2. Effective Communication

Someone wise once said, “The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”3 The larger the organization is, the greater this illusion becomes. As organizations grow, communication challenges grow, as well; in fact, they grow dramatically faster (exponentially) than the organization headcount does. To illustrate this, the following table shows that when there are only three people in an organization, there are three possible communication combinations (persons A&B, A&C, or B&C). However, if you grow a 3- person organization to 25, there is an 8-fold increase in the number of people but a 100-fold increase in the communications combinations! A 100-person organization is 33 times the size of a 3-person organization but 1650 times more complex from a communications perspective.

Organizations respond to this increased complexity by creating business units, divisions, departments, groups, etc. In other words, more layers. When you add to this challenge the fact that experts believe that 55% of communication takes place through nonverbal body language, it becomes clear how great an advantage it is to be able to gather everyone together in one place quickly and easily.

3. Timely Decision-Making

Decision-making is also dramatically different in smaller organizations. As organizations increase in size, the leadership team moves from generalists to specialists who are responsible for a particular business area. Because top decision-makers in a larger organization are more insulated from the day-to-day activities of the company, they no longer have the first-hand knowledge to make decisions without the input of several other specialists. The result is slower and often lower-quality decisions.

In small businesses, however, there are fewer decision-makers, and they’re so close to customers, employees and daily operations that they can get a sense of whether a decision is right or wrong very quickly.

4. Customer Intimacy

In smaller organizations, a much greater percentage of employees work with customers directly. This includes the leaders in the organization, who frequently are still involved in closing sales or supporting clients. This kind of closeness to customers means the people in the company know customer issues and they can spot changing market needs earlier. And because their decision-making is more timely, they can act on those trends earlier.

5. Attracting Team Members

Small businesses don’t have to take a back seat to larger organizations when recruiting top people (and they shouldn't). The advantages already discussed—connection to purpose, effective communication, timely decision-making, and customer intimacy—when explained very carefully to all candidates, can provide a great draw to the most talented prospects. It’s important to recognize that many people who haven’t worked in large companies may not understand these advantages. Yet for people who are experienced in larger organizations, the advantages will be obvious and often quite welcome.

The point of all this isn't that small businesses are better than big businesses, but that they’re different than big businesses. And learning to leverage differences is what competitive advantage is all about. Yet many small businesses don’t consciously develop strategies that use their advantages. As you read on, you’ll begin to see how the Six Disciplines Methodology helps small businesses systematically take advantage of their strengths.

-From Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Exellence

Even though small businesses collectively generate $5 trillion in sales in the U.S., the biggest challenge of an individual small business is “survival.” 80% of all new business start-ups are out of business within five years. And if that doesn’t get your attention, 80% of the 20% that survive the first five years don’t survive the second five!2 That means, on the average, 960 out of 1,000 businesses that start this year will not be around in 10 years. This is proof that you’re in an elite group if you’ve just survived (let alone “thrived”)! What makes it so hard?

After working with thousands of small businesses for many years, we’ve learned that the top issues small businesses struggle with can be grouped into the following general categories:

1. Financial Issues. Includes finding adequate funding, getting billings out on time, collections, and credit management. In a word, a top problem is CASH.
   
2. Customer Issues. Includes understanding what the customer really wants, finding enough of the right kind of customers and keeping them happy, so they don’t turn to competitors.
   
3. Production Issues. Varies by type of business. In general, businesses of all types struggle with being able to give customers what they want, when they want it, at the price they want it, and at the highest quality levels. Doing this predictably and repeatedly is a tremendous challenge.
   
4. People Issues. Includes finding the right people, keeping them happy, compensating them, motivating them, training them, and getting them to deliver quality work.
   
5. Limited Resources. Small businesses usually don’t have large cash reserves, dedicated research departments, fully-staffed IT functions, strategic planning functions, etc., to address challenges or opportunities.
   
6. Growth. Growth brings the challenge of change. It’s one thing to get good at something when you can hone your skills through repetition; it’s a completely different challenge to get good and stay good when the rules of the game keep changing with regard to competition, customer expectations, globalization, people issues, finance, technology, etc.
   

At times, these challenges can be daunting, indeed overwhelming. It’s encouraging to know that the struggles we encounter every day are normal. All small businesses face them. And like other “heroes,” we continue the fight because the cause is worth it.

Check out the Six Disciplines Organizational Performance Assessment to benchmark your small business.

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3. Disciplined Approach to Business

For some people, the old-fashioned idea of being “disciplined” is a turn-off. But that’s not so for the top performers. They’re rated 114 % stronger than the lowest performers when it comes to taking a disciplined approach to business. Instead of “shooting from the hip,” top-performing small businesses take the time to plan well in advance for changes that are likely to affect their organizations. They do so because the people in the higher-performing organizations truly believe that planning is a critical factor in achieving company success, as opposed to just being a “high overhead exercise.”

However, top performers are also very practical, in that they value planning more than voluminous planning documents. Eisenhower said it this way: “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” High-per-forming small businesses work at being realistic; they “sweat the details.” They’re careful about not forming or setting their expectations until they’ve learned enough about the situation at hand to know whether or not those expections are reasonable. They have a culture where people don’t go off “half-cocked.” They’re disciplined about the commitments they make.

4. Strategic Use of Technology

High-performing organizations give more emphasis than lower-performing companies to using technology to impact the business in strategic ways (109 percent more, according to our analysis). Underlying this rating is the greater use of long-term technology plans aimed at delivering competitive advantage.

Such organizations have developed a culture that figures out ways to deploy technology, not for technology’s sake, but to better serve their strategy. They’re also willing and able to invest to make it happen. This investment includes not just the technology itself, but the training to make sure they maximize the utilization of the technology.

5. Effective Use of Trusted Relationships

Another area where high-performing organizations stand out is their ability to utilize the expertise of external organizations. Top performers are rated more than 100 percent stronger than the lower-performing organizations in this area. Because of their size, small businesses have more generalists than specialists in their organizations and, as a result, can make decisions quickly, while keeping overhead costs lower.

High-performing small businesses have learned to supplement their internal expertise by building trusted relationships with the right types of organizations. This allows them to cost-effectively buy the amount of expertise they need when they need it. One example from our research indicated that high-performing organizations rate their satisfaction with the business advice they get from their external CPA much higher than low-performing organizations.

We believe there are three primary reasons why such organizations are more effective using outside expertise. First, high-performing organizations are stronger financially and can afford to hire the best. In addition, they can afford to make contractor selection mistakes and learn from them. Some of my toughest learning experiences in business have been related to picking the right (or “wrong”) advisors.

Second, high-performing organizations have a clearer picture of where they want to go. They have a clear vision and strong leadership, and are disciplined in their approach to business. All these factors make it easier to focus a consultant or advisor on something specific. Ill-defined projects are a guaranteed formula for failure.

Third, high-performing organizations have stronger learning cultures that allow them to do a better job of listening to and applying expert advice. This feeds on itself: the more they listen and learn, the better they perform, and the better they perform, the better advisors they can hire.

All these factors together give top-performing small businesses the great advantage of being able to utilize outside talent when needed.

-From Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Exellence

In trying to better quantify factors that contribute to excellence, we surveyed more than 300 small businesses (each with 10 to 100 employees) that included a range of service, product and project-oriented companies. The participants, who were all owners or senior leaders in their organizations, rated their businesses on many different areas of performance.

For this analysis, we evaluated organizations based on a combined factor of growth and profitability. We thoroughly analyzed the results and looked for areas where the lowest- and highest-performing organizations were the most different. We found several areas where the contrasts were significant.

1. Strength of the Leadership Team

In our research, the leadership teams of top-performing organizations rated 155% higher than the lower performers. There were two primary factors evaluated in this rating. The first was the ability of leadership to define a clear vision for the company. For full effectiveness, the vision needs to be well-defined and explained in a way so people connect with it and are motivated by it.

The second major factor was appropriate involvement of leadership in leading and supporting projects that are strategic to the organization. People in organizations (and everywhere, for that matter) read the actions of leadership to determine what’s important and what’s valued. Strategy statements and posters by themselves are ineffective.

One client expressed it this way: “People go in the direction leadership is walking, not pointing.” The research suggests that the leadership of high-performing organizations know where they want the organization to go, make sure everyone else understands the direction, and are visibly engaged in helping the organization move in that direction.

2. Attract and Retain Quality People

Top-performing organizations are rated 142% stronger at attracting and retaining high-quality people than the lowest performers. Finding people, motivating them, compensating them, keeping them focused, and keeping them satisfied are always hot topics in focus group research and in conversations we have with business owners. This is one of the most dynamic challenges for all businesses. The best small businesses have figured out that success in this area starts with recruiting.

It’s very hard to overcome a hiring mistake, and excellent businesses leave nothing to chance in making their hires. In addition, the top small businesses use the strength of their leadership teams, their stability, their sense of purpose, and the quality of people around them to retain people once they’re on board.

-From Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Exellence

Next week we will discuss the next 3 areas where the contrasts were significant

Lasting

There’s a big difference between an “excellent book” and an “excellent author.” The evaluation of a single book is self-contained; it stands on its own. We would normally think, however, of an excellent author as one who wrote over a long period of time and demonstrated the ability to produce excellent books on a repeatable basis. We’ve all witnessed or participated in moments of excellence: a great round of golf, a superb musical performance, or a terrific sales quarter. However, a great round of golf isn’t the same as a great season of golf, nor is it the same as a great career in golf.

If the ultimate measure of business excellence is learning and leading for a long time, then how long is “enough?” Is success for ten years enough? Twenty years? Fifty years? In their best-selling book, Built to Last, authors Jim Collins and Jerry Porras studied businesses that survived at least 100 years, in order to learn more about enduring companies. In the end, this question of “how long” is one only you can answer.

When it comes to improvement methodologies, whether for businesses or individuals, experience teaches us to be skeptical. During the last few years that I was leading the Solomon organization, I co-facilitated Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People for the whole company in about 25 small-group sessions.

This three-day training got rave reviews from our team members. I had notes from wives thanking us for helping their husbands. We had requests from employees’ spouses to attend. The book by the same name has been on the best-seller list for almost 10 years. The bottom line is that Seven Habits is filled with good principles and practices that help make individuals more effective, both personally and professionally.

However, I’ve made it a practice to ask people who were in one of my sessions if they’re still following the prescribed approach. Some lasted a year, some two, but no one I’ve spoken to lasted three years. Remember what Eric said at the business improvement conference in Whitefish, Montana? “This material is outstanding—but I probably won’t be doing anything about it two years from now.”

This fellow isn’t alone. We’ve all undertaken programs we didn’t stick with—whether a quality program at work or a fitness regimen at home. He was simply expressing the largely unspoken and unresolved sentiment—or is it dilemma?—of millions.

Seeing such a pervasive pattern begs the question “Why?” As you read on, we’ll begin to answer this question and show you what to do about it.

-From Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Exellence

Leading

During a recent meeting of the school board (of which I am a member), we were interviewing candidates for an open position. “Susan” (not her real name) was one of the most energetic and passionate individuals I’ve ever come across in an interview, anywhere. She frequently referred to “excellence” in her answers to our questions: “a desire to be excellent;” “a desire to encourage teachers to be excellent;” “a desire to encourage students to be excellent;” etc.

At one point, someone in the meeting finally asked Susan, “What’s your definition of excellence?” There was silence, and then a stumbling answer about “attitude” and “effort” and “enthusiasm.” Although I believe Susan clearly has a passion for excellence, she hasn’t yet determined what it is. As stated earlier, achieving excellence begins with deciding what excellence means to you or to your organization.

I remember, as CEO of Solomon, year after year, I’d write goal statements like, “. . . to be the leader in the accounting software market.” Over the years, we learned we needed to be more specific in terms of defining our leadership. What types of leadership did we want (full services, price, convenience)? In what markets (type of company, geography, etc.) did we want to lead?

One of the most difficult parts of being a “leading” organization is making choices between one path of leadership and another. Most of us are reluctant to make such choices, because it eliminates options and it holds us responsible to succeed in that one chosen area.

In his book, The Call, Os Guinness describes a similar challenge for graduate students making career choices. He says, “Graduate students confront it (the challenge of choosing a path) when the excitement of ‘the world is my oyster’ is chilled by the thought that opening up one choice means closing down others.”

The reality of life is that we can’t “have it all,” and if we try to get it all, we end up getting very little. Oh, how hard it is to say “yes” to the areas we want to lead in, and to say “no” to the others. The courage and wisdom to do so is one of the major factors that separate leading organizations from the rest of the pack.

We, as business leaders, do great damage when we stir up the passions people have for pursuing excellence if we haven’t yet figured out what our business strategy is—what dimensions of leadership the organization is going to pursue. General conversation about excellence without focused directions for action just gives people a spark of hope that’s quickly dashed, because passion that’s not applied to a purpose doesn’t lead to excellence.

In summary, committing to excellence means committing the organization to being a leader in some area that’s important to customers, and then pursuing that leadership relentlessly. The Six Disciplines Methodology is designed to help organizations choose the areas in which they want to lead and, more importantly, to help people align their creative talents and their energy toward that purpose. With the proper focus and clarity, the potential of the organization will be unleashed and expanded for the benefit and reward of both the customers and everyone in the organization.

-From Gary Harpst's Six Disciplines for Exellence

Excellent small businesses should have three primary attributes. First, they should be learning organizations. Individuals in the organization should be like members of an Olympic team, where the best keep learning how to get better.

Second, excellent organizations should have clearly defined areas in which they have chosen to be leaders, and they should be relentless in their pursuit of those areas.

Third, the ultimate mark of business excellence is the ability to sustain success—to handle the difficult times well and to continue to grow stronger and better. As you read on, you’ll learn a step-by-step approach that helps your organization learn, lead and last.

Over the next three weeks, I will be going more in-depth with these three attributes.

Click here to Check out the Six Disciplines books

Excellence, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Different people have different standards of excellence. If you’re serious about pursuing excellence, you must decide what excellence means for your organization. You also need to be prepared to have your definition change, because as you learn and grow, your expectations will change as well. For businesses, it’s useful to think of excellence in terms of two broad categories. The first is customer excellence and the second is business excellence.

Customer excellence has to do with those attributes that are of direct interest to customers, such as quality, price, reliability, taste, speed, etc. This is the type of excellence that wins product reviews and is featured in advertisements and promotional material. One of the primary functions of business strategy is choosing the dimensions of excellence in which the company will pursue leadership. For example, some businesses may focus their efforts on price leadership, some on full service, or some on convenience.

In contrast to customer excellence, business excellence is more transcendent and includes characteristics which are valued and highly desirable, regardless of business type: growth, profitability, predictability, longevity, etc. Business excellence and customer excellence are mutually dependent, because neither can be sustained without the other. In other words, satisfied customers drive business success and business success enables investment to satisfy customers.

We can learn much about achieving excellence—not only for our customers, but for ourselves—by taking a lesson from franchises. The franchising concept has been wildly successful over the past 40 years. The appeal of a franchise is rooted in two promises. First, there’s a very clear promise to the customer that’s reflected in the brand. What comes to mind when you think of Starbucks?

Second, there’s a promise to the business owner (franchisee) of a well-considered and proven business model that delivers on the customer promise. The result is two-fold. It delievers something of excellence to the customer—a steaming hot, fresh-brewed cup of coffee. It also delivers something of excellence to the business owner—a predictable return on investment, established business procedures, employee training, staffing plans, marketing strategies and interested customers.

The point isn’t that all businesses should be franchised; the point is that all businesses would benefit from taking the same holistic approach to excellence that franchises take. Franchised businesses recognize that there really are two products—the product or service which the customer buys, and the business which the investor buys. The goal of Six Disciplines for Excellence is to help business leaders work on their businesses so they can be as satisfied with their businesses as their customers are with their products.

-Gary Harpst in Six Disciplines for Excellence

A methodology, or method, is another name for any step-by-step approach to getting something done. We have methodologies all around us at work and at home, even though we may call them by different names. A recipe for baking a cake is really a methodology. The design and construction processes for building a house constitute a methodology. Most professions have a variety of standard practices to follow to arrive at long-term success. Software developers, architects, engineers, even physicians all have standard, repeatable practices they follow to complete their work successfully. These tried-and-true methods usually emerge as a result of best practices, standards, rules, and procedures developed over a number of years.

Just as the purpose of a home-construction methodology is to build excellent homes, the purpose of a business-building methodology is to build excellent businesses. In Chapter 6, we pointed out that customer excellence caters to the end-user or the customer. In the home-construction example, an excellent home caters to homeowners’ preferences, including style, comfort, energy efficiency, and price. Similarly, a business building methodology caters to the goals of business owners: profitable and predictable growth, engaged employees, strong reputation, and a large and loyal customer base.

The initial success of a business depends primarily on the ability to build top quality products or services. An organization’s enduring success depends on building the business itself, in addition to its products and services. Understanding this distinction is critical. You must use a methodology that’s designed for whatever it is you’re building if you expect to achieve consistent results.

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Click Here to learn more about the Six Disciplines Methodology.

The critical question for every business leader is, “How do I build an organization that consistently executes its strategy?” Or to rephrase the question using the business excellence model, “How can we spend the maximum amount of time in Quadrant II, balancing the right directional choices with the ability to get there.”

The answer: it takes a complete program. The reasons other approaches do not last is that they are missing key elements. Technology alone is not enough. Training, by itself, is not adequate. Simply reading best-selling books won’t do it. New leadership by itself is not the answer. Retaining better people won’t make the critical difference. Hiring an executive coach by itself will not overcome this challenge. No, the answer lies in taking a more profoundly holistic approach. Our field research has shown us that singular piece-meal approaches just don’t last. Sustainability, the capacity of an organization to maintain the necessary balance between strategy and execution, and doing so while overcoming the Expertise hurdle, economics hurdle, and the Human Nature hurdles, requires a complete program consisting of four tightly-integrated elements.

·         A Repeatable Methodology to drive organizational learning and understanding

·         Accountability Coaching to nurture and nudge to stay the course

·         An Execution System to engage everyone, every day in real-time alignment

·         Community Learning to share and reinforce best practices and accelerate learning

Different experts may use alternate terms for these concepts, but rather than fixating on terminology for now, it’s better to focus on understanding the underlying principles.

Six Disciplines has been able to create a program that contains all four of these elements. Click Here to learn more.

"In the pursuit of excellence, figuring out the right things to do isn't nearly as difficult as continuing to do them over the long term. One of the most persistent challenges we face as humans is to narrow the gap between knowing what needs to be done, and actually doing what needs to be done. In fact, as business leaders, we collectively know quite a bit about what needs to be done. We've read the books, taken seminars, and listened to management gurus. We've even earned business degrees in understanding what needs to be done. Yet the challenge to somehow bridge this gap continues.

Think about this knowing-versus-doing gap in your own life, and how it relates to dieting, for example. Or let’s consider the 40-year old business called Weight Watchers, which generated worldwide revenues of $3.0 billion in 2006. The core of the Weight Watchers approach is the weekly meeting that promotes weight loss through education and group support, in conjunction with a flexible, healthy diet. Each week, 1.5 million people attend approximately 50,000 Weight Watchers meetings, led by 15,000 classroom leaders around the world.

In the Weight Watchers business model, the counselors talk to you, weigh you, and educate you through group involvement about food and exercise. Essentially, they give you the kind of advice that you probably learned in grade school. And, you pay them for it! In my experience, its money well spent, because when I stop going to the weekly meetings, I gain the weight back. My point in this example is simple. What happens at Weight Watchers are things we already know how to do—in other words, we already know to eat right, exercise and weigh ourselves. Yet on our own, do we?"

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Click Here to learn about the Six Disciplines Implementation Approach.

For the Execution Revolution to occur in small and mid-sized businesses, the acquisition cost equation for adopting a strategy execution program based on proven best practices must be proportionate to its outcome. No program can be practical if the cost to implement it is prohibitive.

Larger businesses spend about two percent of sales to maintain their IT operations. Assuming this same rate of investment, a $10 million company would invest $1 million over a five-year period and a $1 billion company would invest $100 million. Clearly, there is much more opportunity to invest in best practices when the budget is large.

Remember that investments in software and technology are, in essence, investments in more effective business best practices. Small and mid-sized businesses simply don’t have the economies of scale to invest in the array of technologies and programs described in Chapter 4, not to mention the expertise to integrate and utilize it effectively.

The sobering conclusion is that mastering even one of these business improvement disciplines requires a substantial investment. None of them comes cheaply, and there are no shortcuts. In the past, taking your company from good to great in one or more of these disciplines required money, time (maybe decades) and expertise (in-house experts or external consultants). And until now, these developments were only affordable to big business.

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Click here to learn more about the how investing in software and technology can help businesses thrive.

Coaching is a mainstay of corporate organizational development and has experienced a long evolution since its beginnings in the late 1950's. Growth of the coaching industry was rapid in the 1980's, when it was hailed as a management tool for improving work performance and for building teams.

In a 1996 Newsweek article, Thomas Leonard, considered to be one of the fathers of business coaching, estimated there were 1,000 coaches nationwide. In 1999, the first year that member numbers were recorded, the International Coach Federation (ICF) had 2,122 members. By 2008, ICF membership exceeded 14,000. 

Executive coaching services are an extension of the coaching industry, and their growth in popularity can be explained by our modern-day business environment. Executives are required to manage greater complexity, risk, and pressure at a faster pace than ever before. In order to perform effectively, they need a way to accelerate learning, improve performance, and modify behavior accordingly. Of the executives who have worked with an executive coach, 93 percent reported that it was a positive, sometimes life-changing, experience. 

Despite the preference by some business coaches to conduct their services by phone, clients express a strong preference to do so in person. Sherpa Coaching released a study that showed an overwhelming 96 percent of those who had worked with an executive coach say in-person coaching is the best.

Unlike stand-alone training programs that cover a particular issue or topic, coaching is an ongoing, consistent process that focuses on specific performance-related goals. As an Ivy Business Journal article expressed in 2000:

Coaching simply speeds up a process of change that would most likely occur anyway, if an individual had enough time. Without a coaching program that forces a client to focus and make time, people sometimes miss the real issues they need to focus on.

In 2004, a Harvard Business Review report summarized the reasons why executive coaching works:

•        Executive coaching engages with people in customized ways that acknowledge and honor their individuality. The essentially human nature of coaching is what makes it work—and also what makes it nearly impossible to quantify.

•         In most organizations, lasting change usually occurs slowly, one person at a time, gaining momentum as more people buy in.

•        To accelerate change and make it stick, they recommend systematically coordinating one-on-one coaching interventions that serve a larger objective.

•        There’s another advantage of starting at the top: once senior leaders have changed their behavior, it’s easier for them to influence the rest of the workforce to do the same.

Related to the executive coaching industry are CEO advisory groups such as Vistage International, TAB (The Alternative Board), and, more recently, online CEO groups such as PeerSightOnline.com. These advisory groups use a peer CEO coaching framework to offer support and advice among their members. As such, the participants, themselves, are essentially CEOs helping other CEOs. In a way, it’s peer to-peer business coaching. There’s much to be said for this approach, since as peers, fellow CEOs can offer a beneficial “been there . . . done that” perspective. There’s a level of trust and belonging within these CEO peer groups that is difficult to gain in other ways. Business coaching has emerged as an industry that has proven its value. The model of bringing outside expertise and accountability to organizations and individuals within organizations works. 

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Coaching is one of the core tenets upon which Six Disciplines Execution Revolution is built on. Click here to learn more.

Long before we heard the phrase “Quality is Job #1,” various movements initiated the concept of systematically improving product quality. Dr. W. Edwards Deming, considered the father of the quality movement, began championing his ideas for a statistical approach to quality in the 1940s and ’50s. The United States was the strongest industrial power at the time, but apparently no one saw the need for what he was prescribing. While Deming’s message fell on deaf ears in America, Japan desperately needed to rebuild its economy after World War II. Deming taught Japan’s top management how to improve design (and thus service), product quality, testing, and sales. In the 1970s, the U.S. market share in the automotive industry began to plummet due to the quality and price gap between U.S. manufacturing and Japanese imports. The economic impact reverberated throughout the U.S., creating the impetus for us to change our ways. This movement continues to bear fruit in many American industries today.

Over the past several decades, a variety of programs, initiatives, and standards have evolved specific to quality improvement, performance, and business excellence. Some of the more prominent approaches include Total Quality Management, the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Program, Six Sigma, ISO-9000, and Lean Manufacturing. All of these programs have contributed to the Execution Revolution about to occur today

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Six Disciplines provides accountability to clients so that they stay focused on strategy and to ensure that “quality is job #1”. To find out more about this, Click Here 

So where is the leapfrog opportunity for small and mid-sized businesses? As you’ve already seen, consistently executing well is an enormous challenge. The tools and enablers for attacking various pieces of the problem are advancing rapidly, but are still fragmented. Large companies have been investing for half a century to develop better solutions for executing strategy.

·         Among their investments have been:

·         Quality programs such as Baldrige, Lean, and TQM

·         ERP systems for transaction automation and process reengineering

·         Knowledge management, data mining tools, and scorecards for performance measurement and management

·         New models of training and employee development, including personal and executive coaching

The progress has been amazing and offers us a platform for an inflection point. The problem, however, is that these areas of advancement are broad and deep in themselves, and they come from different providers and thought leaders. In addition, larger companies have had to spend many times the acquisition costs for these systems in order to implement and maintain them. Small and mid-size businesses can’t realize a sufficient return to justify the high investment levels required to adopt these business best practices. They simply don’t have the expertise or the economic resources to make it work. This is what the Execution Revolution is all about. As you’ll see, the pieces are now falling into place to deliver a complete program for small and medium-size businesses
, a program that large companies are trying to build by piecing together many best-of-breed approaches—at an enormous cost

-Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

“Why is strategy execution so difficult? …Let’s look at managing change. It should be hard: success means growth, growth means change, and change means uncharted territory. If these more obvious changes aren't enough, every individual in your organization is growing and changing, too. Also the industry and your competitors are growing and changing—and you can’t afford to be left behind. “Without change,” warns C. William Pollard, Chairman of The ServiceMaster Company, “there is no innovation, creativity, or incentive for improvement. Those who initiate change will have a better opportunity to manage the change that is inevitable.”

But, in the midst of all this change, how do you keep everyone on the same page? (My family of five can’t even agree where to go for dinner!) When we consider each business individually, we might conclude that the obstacles to executing strategy aren’t just complex, they are downright daunting.”

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Management leadership is one of five levels of leadership that Six Disciplines helps organizations develop. To learn more about the impact that Six Disciplines has on the five levels of leadership, Click Here

“Execution is taking precedence over profit and top-line growth as a focus for CEOs around the world. This is according to a global survey of 769 global chief executives from 40 countries, which was released by The Conference Board in October of 2007. When asked to rate their greatest concerns from among 121 different challenges, these chief executives chose excellence of execution as their top challenge and keeping consistent execution of strategy by top management as their third greatest concern.

A final argument that execution is business’ biggest challenge is the growth of the business improvement industry itself. As business leaders, we’re voracious seekers of business improvement ideas in the form of conferences, books, blogs, and training. We want our performance to be better, and we know it should be better”

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Six Disciplines' Performance Excellence Program has been able to successfully help many companies solve their execution problems. To hear about the benefits of Six Disciplines from an award winning CEO Click Here.

“To achieve a revolution in their execution, business leaders need to reframe their thinking from cutting logs to building ships. In other words, quit thinking only about solving the current problem, but, instead, think about how to build an organization that’s good at solving problems in general- building the capability that’s certain to help overcome an uncertain future.

A ship with a crew that knows how to navigate, maintain the engines, and secure cargo is going to be in a much better position to deal with an unexpected leak than one that can’t keep it moving when there are no problems.”

- Six Disciplines Execution Revolution by Gary Harpst.

Organizations that adopt a total performance excellence program address this issue directly.

The Six Disciplines® Organizational Performance Assessment is the fastest and most effective way to gain clarity about your organization's performance on the key Baldrige performance excellence dimensions of:  

• Leadership / Culture
• Strategy
• Customer Focus
• Measurement 
• People
• Processes
• Results

Expertly designed and analyzed by our professional staff of certified business coaches, the Organizational Performance Assessment service uses questions that map to the Baldrige performance excellence criteria, and uses the Net Promoter Score approach for ranking.   

The Organizational Performance Assessment enables you to gauge the maturity and effectiveness of your leadership and management systems, and provides you with actionable insights and the clear results you need to make significant improvements in organizational performance excellence.  

Here's What You'll Get:

• A complete web-based, email-driven organizational performance assessment and analysis. 
• Fast turn-around (7-10 days from payment and receipt of email address list, to full presentation of assessment results).
• The ability to benchmark your organization's performance - run it again in the future for comparisons, trends, change.
• In-depth recommendations based on the seven key dimensions of performance excellence.
• Benchmark of how your organization's performance compares against industry standards. 
• A one hour web-conference analysis of the Organizational Performance Assessment results for your organization, conducted by a certified performance excellence coach.  
• Complete Organizational Performance Assessment results in PDF format.

The Six Disciplines Organizational Performance Assessment is now available for a limited time for $2,500.  

Get started now - satisfaction guaranteed! 

While the Baldrige framework offers proven characteristics of world-class organizations, it doesn't provide you with an implementation model that shows you how to develop and maintain these characteristics, behaviors, and processes. 

To achieve the benefits of Baldrige faster, Six Disciplines provides the perfect complement to the Baldrige framework, by showing you exactly how to implement a performance excellence program.  

By using Six Disciplines, you get the benefits and the value of Baldrige in one unified program: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis, and knowledge management, workforce focus, operations focus, and results - all within Microsoft Outlook. 

Watch the short video from a National Baldrige award recipient who describes the benefits of Six Disciplines. 

Want to know even more about Six Disciplines and Baldrige?  Watch the extended interview here. 

“You probably already work in Microsoft Outlook – all day, every day.  It helps you manage your email, your calendar, your contacts, your to-do list. 

Now there's a way to get even more value from Outlook. 

Six Disciplines gives you the capability to create strategy, manage plans, set goals, and manage projects - all within Microsoft Outlook. 


Access your organization's goals, plans, initiatives, projects, action Items, and tasks - seamlessly from your desktop, laptop, and smartphone. 

Watch the video - and find out more about how Six Disciplines helps organizations get the most from Microsoft Outlook. 


”

Why don’t more employees do what they are supposed to do?  

In a recent post by Banchard Leaderchat,  author and consultant William Schiemann might have part of the answer—only 14% of the organizations he polled report that their employees have a good understanding of their company’s strategy and direction.

How would your company score on a similar survey? More importantly, what would you do about it? 

A significant breakthrough in performance excellence is achievable, as research shows as much as 37% of all work-related activity doesn't contribute to an organization's strategy.
Organizations that adopt a total performance excellence program address this issue directly.  

While the Baldrige framework offers proven characteristics of world-class organizations, it doesn't provide you with an implementation model that shows you how to develop and maintain these characteristics, behaviors, and processes. 

To achieve the benefits of Baldrige faster, Six Disciplines provides the perfect complement to the Baldrige framework, by showing you exactly how to implement a performance excellence program.  

By using Six Disciplines, you get the benefits and the value of Baldrige in one unified program: leadership, strategic planning, customer focus, measurement, analysis, and knowledge management, workforce focus, operations focus, and results. 

EXCLUSIVE:  Watch an extended interview with the CEO of a Malcolm Baldrige Performance Excellence award-winning organization, as he describes the journey and how Six Disciplines helped along the way. 

One of the best resources about the Baldrige Performance Excellence framework  is "Your Reference Guide to Performance Excellence" (published by NIST) which explains the benefits of Baldrige and the tools, approaches, and resources available to you.

• What Is Performance Excellence?
• What Baldrige Offers You
• What Makes Baldrige Different
• Begin Your Journey
• Benefits of Submitting a Baldrige Application
• More Learning Opportunities

Watch this video - and see how Six Disciplines can accelerate your Baldrige journey.