Inverting the Paradox of Excellence ─ How Companies Use Variations for Business Excellence and How Enterprise Variations Are Enabled by SAP

Taking inspiration from one of the best models of success, the evolutionary model, Inverting the Paradox of Excellence explains why companies should actively seek out changes or variations on a regular basis. Presenting an introduction to the patterns and anti-patterns of excellence, it includes detailed case studies based on different variations including, structure variations, shared values variations, and staff variations.

This book presents various dimensions of business variations that are available for any company to explore in its continual quest for opportunities to achieve and sustain excellence. As long as it collectively and effectively covers the various aspects of an operational company, the exact set of the chosen dimensions of variations is immaterial. This book chooses and extends a set inspired originally by In Search of Excellence (as a tribute to its pioneering effort in focusing interest on the challenges of sustaining excellence in enterprise performance), namely, shared values, strategy, structure, stuff, style, staff, skills, systems and sequence.

Instead of newer case studies, the book presents the usual and long familiar case studies through the prism of the ‘variations’ idea to experience the difference of the ‘case history’ approach presented here. The book includes case history segments for Toyota, Acer, eBay, ABB, Cisco, Blackberry, Tata, Samsung, Volvo, Charles Schwab, McDonald, Scania, Starbucks, Google, Disney, NUMMI and others. It has detailed case histories of three companies GE, IBM and UPS. At industry-level, the book focuses on the Automobile industry because it has been widely witnessed and participated by everyone across the world in the last century.

Vivek Kale has more than two decades of professional experience, including ten years managing ERP, CRM and extended-ERP projects in SAP, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Oracle Applications. His experience includes designing, developing, and consulting on large application software, e-business, knowledge management, and data warehousing solutions. He has handled and consulted on various aspects of enterprise-wide information modeling, enterprise architectures, business process re-design, and e-business architectures. He is the author of Implementing SAP R/3: The Guide for Business and Technology Managers, SAM (2000) and A Guide to Implementing Oracle Siebel CRM 8.x, McGraw-Hill India (2009). Mr. Kale is currently the Chief Information Officer of Raymond, Ltd., and is based in Maharashtra, India.