Reality and Perception and Your Company's Workplace Culture presents a demonstrable path for navigating the change-management process from beginning to end while fully detailing its obstacles and its triumphs. The book presents the view of a fictional 100-year old company called Acme Gyroscope, which is a family owned and run business, and the reader sees how the operation was ruled with an iron hand by the outgoing CEO. When the son of this current CEO assumes the role, he finds that the processes and culture within the organization are not quite as rosy as he thought they were. The new CEO finds that there is a wide divide between what is believed and what is real. The story follows the new CEO and his team as they uncover the problems that exist and discover solutions with the help of the Change Maestro who is an expert on understanding the difference between reality (see the problems, feel the problems, and create the new normal) and perception (preconceived notions of causes and solutions to problems). Utilizing the TLS (Theory of Constraints - Lean - Six Sigma) Continuum toolbox, the Change Maestro takes the management team through the process of resolving the issues at hand and assists in creating a new normal for corporate culture and problem solving. Presented in ten chapters, each representing points on the critical path, it walks the reader through the change process to its conclusion reaching the final point -- the argument for the new normal corporate culture for long-term strategy and survival.

Reality and Perception and Your Company's Workplace Culture presents a demonstrable path for navigating the change-management process from beginning to end while fully detailing its obstacles and its triumphs. The book presents the view of a fictional 100-year old company called Acme Gyroscope, which is a family owned and run business, and the reader sees how the operation was ruled with an iron hand by the outgoing CEO. When the son of this current CEO assumes the role, he finds that the processes and culture within the organization are not quite as rosy as he thought they were. The new CEO finds that there is a wide divide between what is believed and what is real. The story follows the new CEO and his team as they uncover the problems that exist and discover solutions with the help of the Change Maestro who is an expert on understanding the difference between reality (see the problems, feel the problems, and create the new normal) and perception (preconceived notions of causes and solutions to problems). Utilizing the TLS (Theory of Constraints - Lean - Six Sigma) Continuum toolbox, the Change Maestro takes the management team through the process of resolving the issues at hand and assists in creating a new normal for corporate culture and problem solving. Presented in ten chapters, each representing points on the critical path, it walks the reader through the change process to its conclusion reaching the final point -- the argument for the new normal corporate culture for long-term strategy and survival.

One of the major discussions in the business world is: How do we get our human capital assets more engaged in the organization? Current Gallup Polls state that 85% of our employees are not engaged within their organizations. Employee Empowerment fully analyzes this workplace condition, which is a major concern for most CEOs. The solution proposed by this book is the introduction of the TLS (Theory of Constraints - Lean - Six Sigma) Continuum Empowerment model, which comprises three levels of empowerment – Management, Cross-Functional Team, and Individual. The first is the empowerment that comes from upper management to the organization as a whole. The second level is the empowerment that comes from the various cross-functional teams and the final level is from the individuals themselves through their ability to take ownership in the processes in which they are involved. The end solution in the book is that if we can get the human capital assets to take ownership of the processes (that is, empower the front-line employees), it will increase the level of engagement. If they become more engaged they will empower the organization at all levels to introduce sustainable change management to resolve problems within the organization. One of the tools of individual empowerment is the use of the Six Sigma toolbox. This book makes the case that when human capital assets take ownership of the processes, then we have greater engagement, and thus a more empowered organization.

This book provides a roadmap for implementing a powerful technique will reduce waste and accelerate flow within a process -- The TLS Continuum methodology. The letters TLS stand for the three components of the continuum. The letter T stands for the Theory of Constraints. Created by Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt in his book The Goal, it is a critically thinking-based system for determining where the obstacles lie within your organization. Through the use of various tools, it asks you to determine where the obstacles are in the process. The purpose of the Theory of Constraints (TOC) involvement in the continuum is to determine what needs to be changed, how to change it and how to accomplish the change. TOC operates at the level of the chain looking for the weakest link. It is in essence the hypothesis of the problem-solving method overall. The letter L stands for Lean. Most organizations are familiar with the concept of Lean. It is centered around removing waste from the organizational processes so that the customer receives their orders faster. Understand that faster may not mean cheaper or better quality, it means only that we expedite the process. The final letter is S and it represents the concepts of Six Sigma. The primary goal here is remove variation from the processes. If we combine the three letters of the acronym what we find that the TLS continuum is organized around a process in itself. We use the Theory of Constraints to locate and identify the obstacles within the system. What is holding up the process? Where is the weakest link in the process? With the introduction of TOC, the system asks you to elevate the obstacles and determine how to remove them. We use Lean to do what it is meant to do and that is to remove the obstacles. We have identified the obstacle and determined through the critical thinking tools how to remove that obstacle and then use the Lean tools to actually remove the waste. Finally, the system utilizes the Six Sigma tools to create the standard of work and remove any variation from the process. When we do this, we have completed the improvement process by creating a progressive system for resolving the problems that occur within many organizations. It is an evidence-based effort to identify, remove and improve the system so the problem does not recur.

Although world-class firms like GE and Motorola have relied on Six Sigma to build their performance cultures, these processes are all too often left out of human resources (HR) functions. This lack of Six Sigma principles is even more surprising because preventing errors and improving productivity are so critical to the people management processes of hiring, retention, appraisal, and development. From the history and evolution of the Total Quality movement to initiatives for introducing a Six Sigma continuous process improvement strategy in your HR department, Achieving HR Excellence through Six Sigma, Second Edition introduces a new way to envision your role within the organization. It explains how this powerful methodology works and supplies a roadmap to help you find and eliminate waste in your HR processes. Describing exactly what HR excellence means, the book outlines dozens of proven approaches as well as a hierarchy of the exact steps required to achieve it. It illustrates the Six Sigma methodology from the creation of a project to its successful completion. At each stage, it describes the specific tools currently available and provides examples of organizations that have used Six Sigma within HR to improve their organizations. The text presents proven approaches that can help you solve and even eliminate people management problems altogether. Filled with real-world examples, it demonstrates how to implement Six Sigma into the transformational side of your organization. It also includes a listing of additional resources to help you along your Six Sigma journey. Explaining how to build a new business model for your HR organization, the book supplies the new perspective and broad view you will need to discover and recommend game-changing alternatives to traditional HR approaches in your organization. The first edition of this book was one of the first to demonstrate how HR professionals could enhance their careers by learning the language of business — it introduced the evolution of change management and the change management toolbox in a fashion that could easily be implemented in organizations. This new edition updates the first with added information on some of the early history and introduces new case study tools resulting from the author’s continuing work with organizations and in academic environments.

Learn necessary to steps increase productivity and become cost effective, and change any organization into a more dynamic, innovative, and collaborative business. Senior executives and middle-level managers alike can gain techniques to will motivate, encourage, and prepare for the 21st century. Includes checklists, worksheets, and an index.

Organizational culture is a quiet, but driving, influence on our perception of a company, whether as a consumer or as an employee. For instance, we know Southwest Airlines as laid back and friendly. We think of Google as innovative. To almost every well-known company we can assign a character. It is now well recognized that corporate culture has a significant impact on organizational health and performance. Yet, the concept of corporate culture and culture management is too often tantalizingly elusive. In this book, Flamholtz and Randle define culture, identifying and explaining the five key dimensions that determine it: a customer orientation; a people orientation; a process orientation; strong standards of performance and accountability; innovation and openness to change. They explain why culture is a critical factor in organizational success and failure—a key determinant of financial performance. Then, they provide a theoretically sound, highly practical, and field-tested method for managing corporate culture—presenting a set of international and domestic cases that show how actual companies have leveraged culture as the ultimate source of sustainable competitive advantage. In addition to well-known companies such as Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton, American Express, IBM, and Toyota, the text presents lesser known culture stars, such as Smartmatic and Infogix. While other titles on culture have focused too heavily on the organization as a psychological being, or on academic studies of culture as a business lever, Corporate Culture draws on empirics to present a go-to, must-read guide for leveraging corporate culture as a source of competitive advantage and as a means of impacting the bottom line.