Rediscovering Value : Leading the 3-D Enterprise to Sustainable Success

When Improving Performance was published in 1990, it was acclaimed as the book that launched the process improvement revolution—establishing a practical foundation for process improvement and management. In Rediscovering Value, Geary Rummler, Alan Ramias, and Cherie Wilkins establish a foundation for identifying and managing the oft obscured value in organizations. The predominant focus in most organizations is on resources—the resource dimension. What often suffers, or is virtually invisible, is the complex system of work that delivers value to customers and thereby shareholders. The key to sustainable success is keeping these two dimensions in balance—being able to make effective tradeoffs between efficient use of resources and sufficient delivery of value. Most managers equate the management of resources to effective management—believing value will result by default. It turns out that keeping the resource and value dimensions in balance and making the associated tradeoffs requires more than a subtle enhancement to the role of management in organizations. It requires a fundamental rethink of the act of management. Thus management itself becomes the third dimension of a sustainably successful enterprise—the 3-D Enterprise. Rediscovering Value presents the executive agenda for making the transition from a typical unbalanced approach, to managing organization performance, to a true 3-D Enterprise. Readers will appreciate the wealth of practical advice and useful tools found in this book. In addition, the concepts and approach in this book are further supported by a companion book for performance improvement practitioners, White Space Revisited: Creating Value Through Process. The imbalance in the dimensions of organization performance, as illuminated in Rediscovering Value, is at the core of many of the "hot button" issues for executives and managers today including failed strategy execution; costly white space between functions, processes, continents, and partner companies; and the inability to improve top line performance. Organizations that can rediscover their value have an effective weapon with which to fight back.