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BUSINESS IMPROVEMENT PORTFOLIOS
The urgent need for change
It's 12 years since James Belasco wrote a fascinating book called "Teaching the Elephant to Dance", which began with the words:
"We need to change. We're in trouble. Business as usual it out".
His insistent call for organizations to change in the face of unprecedented economic and market changes around the world was not new. Tom Peters had said it before him. Peter Drucker had said it even earlier. (Moving away from the world of business, 100 years earlier, Anatole France had written, "change is the very essence of life". And, of course, countless writers and philosophers have said much the same over the last three millennia.)
With the revolution now being brought about by globalization and e-commerce, no-one in business can argue that change is unnecessary.
How to make change happen
But how to do it? Where to start? How to create the conditions for change? How to deliver the strategies and resources needed to ensure appropriate and effective change?
The need to change is as urgent as ever. But businesses today have one crucial advantage: the experience of companies that have succeeded and of companies that have failed to change successfully.
Again and again it is clear that many small changes create change, and that change which is planned and implemented in a carefully-controlled way is the most likely to succeed.
The business improvement portfolios...
With this in mind, Cambridge Strategy Publications has produced a series of Portfolios which distil the collective experience of many hundreds of World-Class organizations in implementing successful strategies for change.
Each Portfolio focuses on a core technique that has been tried-and-tested in organizations around the world. And each Portfolio gives you a clear business Blueprint: the tools to make that technique work in your organization.
...What they cover
This series of Business Improvement Portfolios covers the four most successful business change and improvement techniques of the last decade:
Benchmarking - the only reliable way to measure your performance against your competitors and identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
Tactical Reengineering - the surest way to improve performance across your organization as you restructure your company department-by-department, process-by-process.
Total Quality - directors, managers and consultants have still to improve on Total Quality as a means of ensuring that everything your company does is focused on the customer and done with the minimum of waste, delay and rework.
Teams - at the heart of every successful improvement initiative (including Benchmarking, Tactical Reengineering and Total Quality), high-performance teams will revolutionize the whole way your company works.
...WHAT THEY CONTAIN
Each of the four Portfolios in this series covers one of the topics in depth. In each Portfolio you'll normally find:
Executive Briefing Papers - giving you a complete introduction to the subject, explaining when to use it (and when not to), where to start, what resources will be required, even setting out ways to convince managers, staff and shareholders that this is the right course.
Case Studies - so you can learn first-hand from the experience of other named organizations that have tried it and made it work.
Project Organizer - all the preparation is done for you. You can put the Organizer to work right away, confident that your company has the best possible "Action Plan" and "Manual" for the job.
As appropriate, you'll also find:
Self-Assessment Audits - to help in the project planning and to ensure that you can measure results at every stage.
Guides to the Critical Success Factors - to help you avoid the most common pitfalls and do everything possible to guarantee that your change or improvement initiative will deliver real bottom-line results.
...Where to get more information
Just follow the links below to get more details of each Portfolio. (To save you time, you can download a printable version of these details, which you can read at your convenience - see the link at the foot of every page.)