Lean Six Sigma, Total Quality Management (TQM), and other process improvement efforts have helped organizations improve; however, these efforts often occur in organizational silos, where the benefits are not felt at the big picture executive level. Lean conference presentations often describe how all company associates in a spirit of organizational improvement need to continually identify and resolve waste-reduction problems; i.e., overproduction, waiting, transportation, inventory, over-processing, motion, and defects. Even though there can be significant benefits from these efforts, Lean practitioner conversations at those same conferences can be describing how their organization eliminated much operational waste only to find that executive management decided to close their facility. There are some elephant in the room business management governance policies that nobody seems to openly discuss. These topics and discussions can include red-yellow-green goal setting scorecards, variance to metric goal tracking, strategic planning sessions often lead to statements that are to have measurements and activities aligned to them, silo improvement efforts that don’t impact the big picture, control systems that are not effective (e.g., Sarbanes Oxley – SOX – did not prevent our current financial crisis from occurring. A business system to address the above issues and accomplish these objectives is the Integrated Enterprise Excellence (IEE) system. In the IEE system, strategy is not step one but set five in a nine-step process. A Chief Performance Officer can use the IEE methodology for their Corporate Performance Management system.
