The Competent Organization

This book is about how the chief executivealong with everyone else directly involvedneeds to think about transforming an okay organization into a fully competent one.

Everyone would like to have a more competent organization. There is a lot of fairy dust out there about how to accomplish that the easy way. But there is no easy way . . . that works. To customers and other stakeholders, it is the performance of the organization that matters. They could not care less about promises that are only sometimes kept. They expect performance.

This book not only tells you how you have to think in order to make this happen but it offers many of the basic tools and techniques for doing so. Making a fully competent organization is a tough go, but it is doable. This book tells you how. It is based upon many years of successful, hands-on experience in creating fully competenteven greatorganizations of all sorts and sizes. With this book as your guide, you, too, could have that competent organization you dare to dream of.

For the past forty-five years or so, I have been traveling the world doing hundreds of seminars for chief executives. My main contribution, however, has been working in the trenches with a few of them to help them make competent or even great organizations. Each is a complex endeavor that has to be customized to the particular organization and its particular executives. Ive talked about this. And Ive answered many questions about it. The time finally came to set forth how to think about doing this, as well as how to get started in actually implementing some of the basics.

This book summarizes my unique approach to making high-performance organizations and the leadership required to do so. It is dedicated to those courageous and committed chief executives who volunteered to undergo the stresses and anguish of making great things happen. It is likely that I have learned as much from them as they have learned from me. We have been passionate partners in making great things happen.