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 Rummier, Alan Ramias, and Cherie Wilkins establish a foundation for identifying and managing the oft obscured value in organizations. The predominant focus in most organiztions is on resources-the resource dimension. What often suffers, or is virtually invisible, is the complex system of work that delivers value of customers and thereby share-holders. 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 sustinably successful enterprise-the 3-D Enterprise.

Rediscovery 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 approch 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 mangers 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.

Geary A. Rummler was the founding partner of the Performance Design Lab (PDL). Prior to founding the PDL, Geary was the founding partner of the Rummler-Brache Group, president of the Kepner-Tregoe Strategy Group, and cofounder and director of the University of Michigan's Center for Programmed Learning for Business.
Alan J. Ramias, partner with PDL, has twenty-five years of experience in performance improvement and organization effectiveness. As a member of the team that founded Motorola University, he was the first person to introduce Rummler's pioneering concepts in process improvement and management to business units within Motorola.
Cherie L. Wilkins, partner with PDL, specializes in measurement and management systems and has extensive consulting experience in the financial services, retail, chemical, petroleum, and manufacturing industries.