Inverting the paradox of excellence : how companies use variations for business excellence and how enterprise variations are enabled by SAP

"Preface In Search of Excellence started a trend of comprehensive efforts worldwide to identify the prescriptive characteristics for excellent companies. However, time and again, corrective measures adopted by companies, based on such prescriptions, have belied expectations. An analysis of Fortune 1000 corporations shows that between 1973 and 1983, 35% of the top 20 companies are new. The number of new companies rises to 45% when the comparison is between 1983 and 1993. It increases even further, to 60%, when the comparison is between 1993 and 2003. It seems that the very strategies that contribute to the competitiveness, success, and excellence of an enterprise, in time, lead to its decline resulting from organizational inertia, complacence, and inflexibility because of overemphasis and adherence on these very proven routines. Companies end up focusing exclusively on a singular or a small set of guiding principles to the exclusion of all others, way beyond the limits of their validity and time. The best-run and most widely admired companies are unable to sustain their market-beating levels of performance for an extended period of time. Large successful firms have greater resources and the forward momentum of established products and customers to carry them through times of distress, disruptions, and disasters. However, many of what were once the biggest, best financed, and most professionally managed companies have slid from the pinnacles of excellence. The book presents one of the most proven and effective model of success in the world: evolution by natural selection. The world of business can be understood in terms of individual companies, the market environment, and variations: the generation of variations, selection and retention of advantageous variations"--