1st Edition
Simple Excellence Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation
Detailing the role of senior management in achieving a successful transformation to organizational excellence, Simple Excellence: Organizing and Aligning the Management Team in a Lean Transformation charts a course of simplification through the complexity often associated with managing performance improvement initiatives. It spells out the roles of key individuals on the management team—including those from sales and marketing, human resources, purchasing/supply chain, information technology, finance, and engineering.
Maintaining a focus on the big picture, this book explains what value streams are and how to use them to structure your business so that all stakeholders are aligned with what matters most. It reduces constraint management to its most practical terms and lays out a sound approach to accounting that enables everyone to spend money where it adds value and stop spending where it doesn’t.
- Drive your management team with dedicated allegience to the concept of value enhancement
- Propel your organization to higher performance through the employment of Lean culture and decision-making principles
- Enact management structures needed to put new ways of thinking into play
- Focus on the bottom line with the right performance metrics
Written by respected authorities with extensive experience helping leading organizations achieve Lean transformation, the text includes case studies from high-profile organizations recognized for operational excellence. Addressing human resources management practices, it explains how to manage the day-to-day operations and pricing factory capabilities for the greatest possible profits. It also discusses the ongoing process of strategic planning to help you move away from annual goal setting, toward a dynamic process of engaging the entire company in the effort to provide your customers with an improved sense of value.
A Different Way of Managing
THINKING DIFFERENTLY
The Mom-and-Pop Theory of Management
It’s All about Value
The High Cost of Poor Cost Accounting
Can We Find a Few Righteous People?
People
Channels and Chains
You Gotta Go with the Flow
MANAGING DIFFERENTLY
Getting Sales and Marketing into the Game
Value-Stream Structures
Simple Accounting
The Roadmap from Chain to Channel
Scheduling the Factory
Purchasing
Quality Management
Sales, Operations, and Financial Planning
Pricing to Win
Capital Investment
Performance Metrics
Wrapping It Up
Index
Biography
Adam Zak is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Adam Zak Executive Search and an accomplished senior executive with more than 25 years of experience spanning the areas of management consulting; financial and operations management; and talent acquisition. Adam excels at identifying and attracting business leaders who are experts in lean continuous improvement, process and operational excellence, and sustainability. His impact on organizations quickly becomes apparent as these talented individuals, in their new leadership roles, consistently go on to make their new companies excellent.Adam has recruited executives for a diverse mix of Fortune 1000, private-equity, and entrepreneurial companies in the United States and abroad. He has worked in a variety of industries from automotive and aerospace giants implementing sustainable operational excellence cultures to fast-paced consumer product distributors revolutionizing their global supply chains with green management practices. Earlier in his career Adam earned a bachelor‘s of science in degree in accounting from the University of Illinois, became a certified public accountant, and worked with KPMG in both advisory and assurance roles. He subsequently held a variety of financial and general management positions with venture capital, innovative start-up, and Fortune-ranked companies in Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. Adam has been using his uncommon expertise to help his clients improve their businesses operationally and financially for almost 20 years. He‘s been a partner with two international executive recruiting firms and now conducts executive searches in a much more creative, entrepreneurial, and results-driven (and lean) fashion. His unique and highlypersonalized methodology for recruiting exceptional talent is trademarked as PDCAsearch. Adam is considered by many to be the most influencial leader to
Simple Excellence is a quick and easy read that finally describes a simple, logical, way to conduct business. Simple principles like, focusing on the customer, eliminating waste, driving costs down, and managing cash are not complex enough for academics and the latest business book gurus to deal with. It’s reassuring to know that many of the principals espoused in this book are the same concepts we focus on here at Parker Hannifin. I will be making this book a must read for my staff. Simple Excellence helps to reinforce that what we are working on here at Parker Hannifin is the right stuff.
—Bob Barker, President, Parker Aerospace & Executive Vice President and Operating Officer, Parker Hannifin Corporation
