Beyond the Lean Revolution: Achieving Successful and Sustainable Enterprise Transformation

CHAPTER–3–A Roadmap to Successful Enterprise Transformation

Men never plan to be failures;

they simply fail to plan to be successful.

William Arthur Ward¹

LET’S BE BLUNT: Most transformation efforts fail. That’s what we see from our experience working with many organizations. By “fail,” we mean either the efforts are not sustainable or they do not achieve the desired strategic objectives. But why do they fail? Our experience shows that almost always, in the end, failure results from the absence of a holistic view of the enterprise at the beginning of the process (in other words, the failure to abide by the first principle of enterprise transformation). Lacking such a view, the effort ends up omitting key elements of a system of transformation ...