"There is at least one point in the history of any company when you have to change dramatically to rise to the next level. Miss the moment, and you start to decline." — Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel quoted in a Fortune article entitled "Dinosaurs?" exploring why successful companies often fail

The high performing "born leader" is a dangerous myth. Few highly effective teams just fall into place on their own because the right people were thrown together. High performing organizations don't automatically emerge because somebody wanted them to, had a brilliant idea, or saw a great market opportunity. Outstanding leaders, teams, and organizations are the result of continuous and systematic improvement efforts. It's hard work. But, if we don't have structure, processes, and disciplined habits to continue improving, we won't. We'll become a change victim rather than victor.

In Firing on All Cylinders I devoted over forty pages (Chapters Twenty and Twenty One) to the details of deploying an organization improvement process. Here's a summary of the keys to success:

• Establish an improvement infrastructure. It starts with a corporate or senior management steering council to lead and coordinate the improvement effort. Local steering councils then coordinate and focus operational and improvement teams.
• Give improvement as much weight in management roles, responsibilities, and accountability as operations.
• In organizations of more than a few hundred people, establish a full time improvement coordinator.
• Develop strong internal support experts for training, process improvement, teams, and any other areas critical to improvement efforts.
• Once a year, take the senior management team off site for two to three days of reviewing the organization improvement progress and planning what they will focus on for the next twelve months.
• Develop a detailed improvement plan. Use it to think through and involve everyone in deciding upon goals and priorities and how to deal with process management, systems and structure, measurement and feedback, education and communication, innovation and organizational learning, skill development, reward and recognition, and teams.
• Publish an annual improvement report. Use it to celebrate and widely broadcast progress to your internal and external partners.
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Improvement Planning Pathways and Pitfalls

• Ensure that teams have a good balance of active and reflective learning. Active learning comes from exploring, searching, creating, and experimenting. Reflective learning comes from taking time out of daily operational pressures to review how well improvement activities are working and plan further changes.
• Develop a two-track approach to change and improvement efforts. One track is short-term. Here we're looking for quick wins and immediate results, particularly from changes to operating processes. The other track is long-term, culture change. Here we need to think through and establish the teams, skills, measurements, structural and system alignments, as well as the education and communication strategies that will profoundly and permanently change "the way we do things around here" (how I define culture).
• Unless we're running experimental pilots or working with highly autonomous divisions or departments, involve the whole organization in the improvement effort.
• Spend as much time planning organization changes and improvements as setting strategies, budgets, and other operational plans. Get unions, work teams, management, external partners (like agents, distributors, and suppliers), and possibly board members involved in planning how to improve the organization's performance capabilities.
• Have an external consultant assess the effectiveness of the organization improvement effort (or use a rigorous, well-researched, self-assessment process). This should form the basis of improvement planning. Do this annually or at least once every two years.
• Make sure every team's improvement activities are clearly aligned with business priorities.
• If you're an internal service/quality, organization development, or training support professional, cut the jargon and esoteric theories. Learn the business and the language of the people you're serving. Adapt your tools, techniques, and improvement processes to do the same.
• Only hire and promote highly self-disciplined, passionate, and continuously improving people into leadership roles. Otherwise you'll be establishing (or continuing) a culture of stagnation and resistance to change.
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Personal, team, or organization improvement doesn't happen just because we want to get better. Unless we have the infrastructure and processes for constant and ongoing improvement, it's all just wishful thinking.