CHAPTER 9Operational Excellence: Supply Chain, Distribution, Continual Improvement

Table represents the seven sub-playbooks.

Operational excellence: supply chain, distribution, and continual improvement comprise the second component of the operational playbook. The heart of operational excellence is turning your cultural choices into guiding principles and then continually improving how you implement them.

What do these have in common?

  1. Communication. Respect. Integrity. Excellence.
  2. Social responsibility. Sustainability. A spirit of partnership. Pro Ehrenamt volunteering initiative.

Each of these is a nice set of corporate values set in stone and ignored by the organization's leaders. The first set belonged to Enron, which got brought down by a complete lack of integrity. The second set is directly from the website of Volkswagen, whose chief executive officer (CEO) resigned because the company was lying about emission tests.1

Specifically, as described by Elaine Shannon of the nonprofit Environmental Working Group,

The company had deliberately installed a “defeat device” in diesel vehicles sold worldwide from 2009 to this year. The device was really a bit of software coding expressly engineered to spoof standard emissions testing instruments and evade the federal Clean Air Act and related state rules.

Whether Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn knew about this or not, he was the leader of an organization in which ...

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