For Educational Purposes.

1. Chapter 9 Building and Sustaining Performance Excellence in Organizations

2. Key Idea Building and sustaining performance excellence requires a readiness for change, the adoption of sound practices and implementation strategies, and an effective organizational infrastructure.

6. Key Idea Culture is reflected by the management policies and actions that a company practices. Therefore, organizations that believe in the principles of quality and performance excellence are more likely to implement the practices successfully. Conversely, actions set culture in motion. As quality practices are used routinely within an organization, its people learn to believe in the principles, and cultural changes can occur.

9. Key Idea Impatient managers often seek immediate cultural change by adopting off-the-shelf quality programs and practices, or by imitating other successful organizations. In most cases, this approach is setting themselves up for failure.

15. Key Idea Organizations contemplating change must answer some tough questions, such as, Why is the change necessary? What will it do to my organization (department, job)? What problems will I encounter in making the change? and perhaps the most important one — What’s in it for me?

17. Contrasts

18. Key Idea There are numerous barriers to transforming organizations to a sustained culture of performance excellence. Understanding these barriers can help significantly in managing change processes. Perhaps the most significant failure encountered in most organizations is a lack of alignment between components of the organizational system.

23. Key Idea Organizations are dynamic entities. Managers must consider the dynamic component in order to deal with instability in the environment, imperfect plans, the need for innovation, and the common human desire for variety and change.

26. Key Idea Self-assessment should identify both strengths and opportunities for improvement, creating a basis for evolving toward higher levels of performance. Thus, a major objective of most self-assessment projects is the improvement of organizational processes based on opportunities identified by the evaluation.

28. Key Idea Following up requires senior leaders to engage in two types of activities: action planning and subsequently tracking implementation progress.