A categorized compilation of favorite posts from the Evolving Excellence blog, Evolving Excellence: Thoughts on Lean Enterprise Leadership offers different-even outright contradictory-viewpoints that explore various aspects of lean enterprise excellence. In the shared desire to see American manufacturing thrive, authors Kevin Meyer and Bill Waddell have poured their knowledge, opinions, and ideas into their blog for the past two years. Sometimes tongue in cheek, usually provocative, occasionally humorous, but always passionate, they point out the failures of companies, organizations, and individuals in the manufacturing industry while also lauding those that understand true excellence. In Evolving Excellence, you'll find a bevy of different topics including: - Learning from the masters of lean manufacturing - Life, liberty, and the pursuit of manufacturing - The false god of the almighty algorithm - Looking lean vs. being lean - The impending global struggle between workers and management "If you love manufacturing then we hope you're reading Evolving Excellence. It's a must-read for manufacturers and those who dream."-Pat Cleary, Senior Vice President, National Association of Manufacturers "The authors are knowledgeable and they tell it like it is."-Bob Emiliani, author of Shingo Prize winning Better Thinking, Better Results Evolving Excellence also includes a glossary of popular terms and a list of resources to help further your knowledge of excellence in manufacturing. Delve into this amazing collection, and discover the different facets of lean enterprise leadership!

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

This book provides a thought provoking evolutionary path toward cultural excellence in a way that addresses a commonly overlooked issue during this or any kind of economic/financial situation-an organizations' culture. Based on 25 years of global/international experience in leading and facilitating purposeful cultural transformations, the author shares Seven Principles for the reader to explore and customize according to the uniqueness of their organizations' culture toward a desired state of excellence. To facilitate this journey, the principles are structured according to a CULTURE acronym allowing for a cultural context to be defined and implemented through ongoing leadership development while dealing with misaligned behavior (Culture Vulture behavior) that flies in face of cultural excellence. The seven action oriented principles are: -Commit to Being a Different Kind of CEO-CULTUREsizing Excellence Officer -Unify the Organization through a Common Unique Cultural Context - Lead, Link & Leverage the Three Primary Modes of Leadership for the Journey -Team Up the Organization for Ongoing Development & Alignment -Underpin All Aspects of Cultural Excellence -Reinforce the Way to Achieve the Desired Cultural Outcomes -Evolve the Journey of CULTUREsizing Excellence Through the exploration of these principles and sizing them up to fit your organizations cultural needs, one will realize a way of life that builds on the diverse magnificence of people to generate and sustain significant results with greater social responsibility. Just remember, any form of change begins with you. Good luck on your journey-alea iacta est

Like the technologies that support it, the craft of online journalism is evolving quickly. This timely book helps students develop standards of excellence, through interviews with more than 30 writers, editors and producers, and dozens of examples of strong work. The author provides a framework of concepts to show how the field is evolving and challenged by competition, staffing limitations, and other pressures. Discussion is organized around four key elements: speed and accuracy with depth in breaking news; comprehensiveness in multimedia content; open-endedness in story development, including public contributions; and conversation with users. Chapter-length treatments of these topics bring home the realities of online work to students, who also come to appreciate how excellence and ethics online go hand in hand.

How the world's most influential companies are building business strategies that tackle the biggest global challenges. Today's business landscape is changing in fundamental ways: Natural resources are growing ever more scarce and expensive. Technology and changing consumer expectations are making transparency a fact of life. The rise of emerging economies creates vast market opportunities for companies--and better living standards for hundreds of millions. In Sustainable Excellence, Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell tell the stories of the companies who are transforming themselves by responding to these paradigm shifts and in the process shaping the future. From their work with these Global 1000 companies, Cramer and Karabell know firsthand how business can successfully grapple with big-picture issues like resource scarcity, supply chain complexities, and the diverse expectations of government and the public. In Sustainable Excellence, they tell the story of how Coca-Cola and Greenpeace collaborated on a refrigerator that fights climate change. They show how companies like Best Buy and Nike are transforming the very products they sell to deliver more value to consumers with less waste. They recount how GE and Google created an innovative partnership that is developing "smart grids" that radically reduce energy use. And they show how business leaders like Starbucks' founder and CEO Howard Schultz put sustainable excellence at the center of his company's business strategy. Through these and other fascinating stories, Sustainable Excellence makes the case for a different way of doing business--one that will define both business success and economic vitality in the 21st century.

The Foundational Handbook on Improvement Research in Education is a pathbreaking effort to build a field of research committed to producing the practical knowledge needed to advance educational access, quality, and equity. This is research distinguished by the use of inclusive, iterative approaches to analysis, design, implementation, and evaluation to understand and address educational opportunities, needs, and problems grounded deeply in school and community contexts. Designed for researchers, students, and educators, the handbook elaborates the intellectual foundations, explores the organizational and policy contexts, reviews approaches, and examines methods of improvement research. It features contributions from a plural community of researchers with expertise in the learning sciences, instructional improvement, organizational and policy studies, and research methodologies, many with extensive experience collaborating with teachers, leadership, families, and advocates in local problem solving and design.