Escape the Improvement Trap : Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes

Despite performance improvement initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, and Supply-Chain Management, only few companies break out of the pack to transform their enterprise. Offering helpful methods and metrics for effecting true change, this book highlights how to avoid the improvement traps that inhibit many organizations from rising above the rest.

Written by two experts who have dedicated their careers to quality improvement, Escape the Improvement Trap: Five Ingredients Missing in Most Improvement Recipes separates itself from other improvement books by looking at why most companies rarely achieve anything more than an average level of improvement maturity. They identify five critical ingredients required for successful improvement:1. A meaningful business value proposition and strategy that drives key improvement actions2. An engaging environment where people can do their best work3. A focus on meaningful metrics while avoiding irrelevant details4. Process improvement efforts that maximize cross-functional process performance and foster deeper process understanding, innovation, and execution of best work practices5. An executive mindset that focuses on customer value, people development, process performance, and business improvement outcomes, not solely on savingsThe authors consider a variety of situations at Independence Enterprise, a fictional company, based on their own very real experiences. They elaborate on the principles that should come into play, look at what Independence Enterprise is doing right and wrong, and suggest deployment actions to help you apply the principles to your own organization.