Finding the Secret Sauce

Over the years, I have consistently expressed the same thought as to how to achieve organizational excellence.

Leaders in organizations tend to want a “plug & play” or “turn-key” solution to organizational excellence. The fact of the matter is’ there is no such thing, regardless of how many consultants, advisors and others will sell one, for the asking. They are there to sell because of the ask.

Truthfully, these methods do not provide a sustainable solution of sustainable results. Millions, perhaps billions of dollars are spent on such solutions, only to find that once the driving force behind the solution no longer exists, neither do the results. I’ll discuss this in a later post.

The thought I consistently express is, “the secret sauce of organizational excellence is found within the walls of your own organization.” This means to find the magic of organizational excellence, you have to do the hard work of building a culture that is capable of continuously producing, continuously improving results. This is the definition of sustainable, as it relates to organizational excellence.

One of Aesop’s greatest fables is the story of the story of the Tortoise and the Hare, with which the vast majority of us are familiar. The “moral” of the story, is that in the long run (no pun intended), we will see greater results by a methodical and thoughtful approach, than a dash for a quick fix.

At the 34th Shingo Conference in Orlando, Florida, the executive responsible for organizational excellence at Hologic, a women’s health, medical device manufacturer and Shingo Prize recipient, talked about this long game, in different terms. He talked about pumping water with an old hand pump. His analogy struck home with many at the conference. When you begin pumping, there is a good deal of action, with little result. Often, it doesn’t even feel like anything is happening, but if you stop, you lose all you have worked for and must start again. If you don’t quit pumping, eventually you will notice some resistance to the weight of the column of water the pump is bringing up. Finally, once the water starts flowing from the pump, the amount of energy expended to keep the water flowing is far less than that to get the water to flow from the spigot on the pump.

You have to do the hard work. There are no shortcuts.

Organizational excellence is the same, but with a cultural dynamic I’ll share in a later post.

Organizational excellence takes years of aspiring to perfection. The first guiding principle of the Shingo Model dimension of Continuous Improvement is “Seek Perfection.” It is this aspiration that drives us to continually improve, as Maasaki Imai said, “Everybody improvement, Everywhere improvement, Every day improvement.”

Getting the organization aligned around this simple concept is the secret sauce. It is not the same for every organization because every organization is different. I often hear, “We can’t do it, because we are different.” What they don’t realize is that it is their difference that provides the “flavor” for their own secret sauce.

So I say, embrace what is different about your organization and look within your own walls to find the secret sauce of organizational excellence that is yours.