The Best Practices Enterprise™

Retail Price: $44.95

Direct Price: $39.95

A Guide to Achieving Sustainable World-Class Performance
By James Kerr
Hardcover, 6×9, 240 pages
ISBN: 978-1-932159-60-8
April 2006

ISBN: 978-1-932159-60-8 Categories: , , ,

Description

This guide to achieving sustainable world-class performance provides guiding principles to senior executives and best practices to managers that, if fully embraced and implemented correctly, will transform most any firm into an organization capable of dominating its industry throughout the 21st Century.

While there are many best practices that firms should consider in their efforts to continuously improve, there are seven best practices that are indispensable in this era of rapid change, increasing customer demands, and intense global competition. These seven best practices address the people, processes, and technology elements of which every enterprise is comprised and without them firmly in place, organizations will eventually flounder. When driven by top management, instituting 15 business principles based on these seven best practices will transform an organization from mediocrity to a powerhouse referred to as The Best Practices Enterprise™. These proven principles and practices are supported by nearly 50 real examples and excerpts from actual projects to demonstrate how multiple organizations have institutionalized these best practices.

13-digit ISBN: 978-1-932159-60-8

Key Features

  • Reveals how to improve top-line and bottom-line performance by transforming typical strategic planning methods to a program-centric strategic planning approach
  • Delineates how IT environments can be designed and built to reach optimal levels of reliable responsiveness and speed-to-market, while maximizing returns on technology investments
  • Demonstrates how portfolio-based project management reduces risk and minimizes costs
  • Illustrates how diversity and inclusion programs and results-focused communication practices can be used to increase effectiveness, profitability and shareholder value
  • Discusses ways to extend standard business redesign practices to improve quality
  • Covers how to achieve superior execution with an integrated approach to continuous employee improvement
  • WAV includes free downloadable tips for effective Best Practices Implementation and Business Transformation — available from the Web Added Value™ Download Resource Center at www.jrosspub.com

About the author(s)

James M. Kerr is the managing partner at KCG, a leading management consulting firm, located in Cromwell, Connecticut that specializes in assisting Fortune 500 firms with corporate visioning, scenario planning, mergers/acquisitions, process design, and enterprise reorganization. Mr. Kerr is a highly-respected management consultant with over 20 years of experience. He is best known for his corporate transformation, strategy formulation, and business redesign work in a wide variety of industries. Clients include Fortune 500 firms AXA Financial, The Home Depot and IBM. He has also lead numerous successful projects in the government sector, including work for the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. This leading expert has been published extensively in the media and previously authored books for McGraw-Hill and John Wiley & Sons. He is a sought after speaker that also teaches graduate-level strategic planning courses within the Lally School of Management at Rensellaer Polytechnic Institute.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Best Practices Enterprise™ — A Vision for the New Era
Chapter 2: Best Practices Business Principles
Chapter 3: Program-Centric Strategic Planning
Chapter 4: Resilient IT Architecture Design
Chapter 5: Portfolio-Based Project Management
Chapter 6: Uninterrupted Business Redesign
Chapter 7: Results-Focused Communications
Chapter 8: Cross-Cultural Workforce Inclusion
Chapter 9: Continuous Employee Improvement
Appendix A: Sample Opportunities Identification Documents
Appendix B: Sample RITA Target Definition Document
Appendix C: Sample Value Chain Case Study
Appendix D: Sample CEI Baseline Report
Index

Reviews

“Every executive who has attempted to implement best practices in their organization can benefit from the simplicity of advice set forth in this book.”

— Ron Harder, Chief Executive Officer, JMIC, Neenah, Wisconsin

“Kerr has demonstrated a great understanding of the challenges that businesses face when competing on a global scale. His strategic planning methodology, as described in The Best Practices Enterprise™, has been used to help Japanese firms merge and consolidate for many years.”

— Koji Yoshida, Managing Director, The General Insurance Association of Japan, Tokyo, Japan