Heading: “Every business system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets” Dr. W. Edwards Deming …
Who was Deming? William Edwards Deming (1900-1993) is widely acknowledged as the leading management thinker in the field of quality. He was a statistician and business consultant whose methods helped hasten Japan’s recovery after the Second World War and beyond.
What are business systems? After 30 years of empirical research, two Harvard researchers, Professors Lawrence and Lorch, followed by Dr. Labovitz’s book, Power of alignment, quantified 6 business systems that are common to every business. When they act in concert with each other, a business is aligned, and thus, “Aligned organizations outperform their nearest competitor by every financial measure.
So, these very smart guys are telling us that a path to having the best business on the planet, is to start by leadership getting their business systems aligned. Right?
RIGHT! How do you begin to get aligned? How do you define alignment? These are the core elements of Alignment-Strategy; People; Process; Customer. Leadership makes it work; Culture makes it succeed. This is the framework that is baked into every business since the beginning of time. How you get the pieces to work together is the challenge.
Some of these answers are found in the book, Back From The Brink. The book idea started as a way for leaders to regroup from COVID, but it became immediately apparent that it also pertains to poorly led companies as well.
So, it seems that leadership might be the secret sauce. What does that mean? How do you become a successful leader? We can save that for later articles, but initially, it’s to become an informed leader. Know what’s going on in your business, with your customers, what might be making your people unhappy, test the effectiveness of your managers and more. Pilots call this “situational awareness.” Great leaders have lots of qualities, but successful leaders have but one-“situational awareness.”
Stanley Labovitz, J.D., CEO
SurveyTelligence, Inc.
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Author: Back From The Brink
