Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization.
In State of Readiness , Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence , the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.
Joseph F. Paris Jr. is a recognized thought leader on the subject of operational excellence, an international entrepreneur, a prolific writer, and a sought-after strategist, consultant, and speaker with engagements from around the world.
With over 30 years of experience in international business and operations, he is routinely called upon to offer guidance to C-suite and senior executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists who wish to improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of their organizations. He is highly valued for his ability to provide strategic insight and tactical analysis—and to convert these thoughts into reality by successful engagement and execution.
He is forever seeking ways to improve businesses and the circumstances of those who work there. With an understanding that culture matters, he always approaches challenges with empathy; from their perspective and in their context. He is patient, but pressing as he helps guide companies and their people through transformational change.
Although he is an expert in the more granular facets of the discipline, he places a special emphasis on the cornerstones for success: the engagement of people and instilling a leadership culture as part of the company’s DNA. His end-goal is to help create high-performance individuals working in high-performance teams for high-performance companies.
His vehicles for change and delivering the promises of operational excellence include the following:
• Chairman of the XONITEK group of companies, a management and operations consultancy helping companies located around the globe. • Founder of the Operational Excellence Society, a think tank serving professionals in the field of operational excellence and its greater ecosystem. • Publisher of the Operational Excellence by Design newsletter, with over 30,000 subscribers. • Owner of the Operational Excellence LinkedIn group, with over 60,000 members. • Producer and co-host of The Outliers Inn, a podcast that examines typical business issues from atypical perspectives.
In addition, Paris serves on the editorial board of The Lean Management Journal and the advisory boards of the Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department at the Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University, the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers’ Industry Advisory Board, the New York City Chapter of the Association for Corporate Growth.
This book should be a must-read for MBA and operations students. Joseph's writing is easy to comprehend and practical, although some of the concepts could be technical in nature, he makes sure the core concepts are well explained in the beginning and provides later on the practical application. It is very hard to find a book that combines the operational/industrial engineering concepts , business sense and leadership in one and this book accomplishes this perfectly. Also, Joseph's vast international experience as a consultant is reflected in the book and is shared widely. It helped me to learn how to determine if my company and myself as a leader are ready to perform at a higher level. I highly recommend the book and appreciate the great contribution of the author to continuous improvement. It has been a pleasure to see Joseph in action at the Institute of Industrial Engineers conferences and testify the great effort of putting together this awesome book!