Principles Drive Performance Excellence

In his 1998 letter, Bezos defined operational excellence as a core company value. According to Bezos, “Operational excellence implies two things. Delivering continuous improvement in customer experience and driving productivity, margin, efficiency, and asset velocity across all our businesses.”?

In a 2018 interview, Bezos was still reminding employees that the company values excellence in the behind-the-scenes efforts that most consumers will never see—but they’ll see the results like on-time delivery.?

Amazon has 16 principles that drives the all the activities performed and decision taken by most of the employees. It defines ‘Leadership Principles’ as key constituents of ‘who we are’. ?“… Our Leadership Principles describe how Amazon does business, how leaders lead, and how we keep the customer at the center of our decisions. Our unique Amazon culture, described by our Leadership Principles, helps us relentlessly pursue our mission of being Earth’s most customer-centric company, best employer, and safest place to work…” [1]

Baldrige Performance Excellence Programs is USA’s public-private partnership program dedicated to organizational performance management to improve value for customers and stakeholders. It defines 11 ‘Core Values and Concepts’ as beliefs and behaviours those are embedded in high-performing organizations. It indicates how organization and people are expected to operate. [2]

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is based on 10 undisputable Lean-Agile principles. These principles inspire and guide the roles and practices for business agility. There can’t be one size fit all solution approach or set of practices that can be applied to unique set of challenges and complexities every enterprise face. Hence practices should be grounded in foundation of principles. [3]

When one looks at the performance excellence discipline over past century, thinkers have advocated the need for principles that drive the practices – e.g. Deming’s 14 principles for Management, the Juran model and excellence framework, etc.?Study the successful enterprises that have lasted for multiple decades and may be even century - ‘principles for performance excellence’ emerges common theme. These principles may vary and they have evolved, however organizations have taken painstaking effort to define them, advocate them, live by them.

I attempted to find the common themes across these principles. Table below depicts the categorization. You are welcome to share your perspective and feedback about this categorization.

Organizations have defined these principles based on the collective wisdom of the respective teams. In the given context of the organization, they have served the purpose and helped organization to deliver sustainable results. Hence, it’s significantly difficult to say what works and what doesn’t. I consider following five as foundation for performance excellence.

• Customer-centric excellence

Any organization can be defined on the two axis – whom do we sell (market segments & customers) and what do we sell (products and services). Customer centricity is mind-set. Once organization starts putting customer success as first priority, growth and profit follows. Have you come across any organization which has gone out-of-business, even it was fulfilling the current and future needs of customers?

• Systems thinking

“Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context—a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.” – Erro Sarrinen, Architect.?Systems thinking helps to connect with big picture and ‘why’ of what one is doing. One can always connect with up-stream, down-stream and sideways interfaces, even If one is working on components / units or sub-systems. We are taught to divide the problem in part and solve them. While this may help to complete the complex tasks, however we loose sight of the larger whole. System thinking enables global improvement as whole rather than local optima focus.

• ?Valuing people

Dr Eli Goldratt advocates in ‘the choice’ – “… One, all people are good… Five, every person can reach full life”. It’s the choice one makes, whether to treat the team-mates as the assets to be deployed on engagements or people who share common objectives of making difference to customers and other stakeholders. It’s an imperative for organization to create an environment where individuals finds and / or create opportunities to create positive impact to others while pursuing one’s purpose of life.

• Management by fact

Data has emerged as 4th category of organizational capability along-side process, people and technology. Getting newer insights from data has turned into a competitive advantage for the organization. Handling of structured and unstructured data should result into creating actionable insights, providing early warnings and predicting performance with reliability should be the priority.

• Deliver value and result

Defining objectives and key results proactively and then achieving them in time-bound manner is the main priority of the organization. Organization’s ability to deliver the value it promised to its customer and stakeholders is the testimony of its capabilities. Sometime it become challenging to balance conflicting needs of business values among the different stakeholders.

Principles are ‘building blocks’ of the high performing organization. Organization needs to identify them and communicate them across the breadth and depth of the structure. They need to be infused in the culture through daily decision making as well as process ways of working.

?References –

1.???????https://www.aboutamazon.com/about-us/leadership-principles

2.???????https://www.nist.gov/baldrige/core-values-and-concepts

3.???????https://www.scaledagileframework.com/safe-lean-agile-principles/

Copyright acknowledged – ? amazon.com , ? nist.gov, ? ScaledAgile Inc.

Views expressed are personal