Operational Empowerment: Collaborate, Innovate, and Engage to Beat the Competition

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
Join the Operational Empowerment Community! xiii

Part 1: The Infliction of Poor Operational Performance
Chapter 1: The Power Is in the People: MisconceptionsThat Reduce Operational Performance 3
Chapter 2: Operational Building Blocks: A Foundation for Growth and Profitability 17
Chapter 3: Leading with Leverage: What the C-Suite Doesn’t Know and How It Hurts Them 43

Part 2: Focus and Momentum Equate to Operational Power
Chapter 4: Strategic Strings: Helping Employees Connect with Your Vision 63
Chapter 5: Engage the Masses: Building a Continuous Improvement Community 87
Chapter 6: Hit the Ground Running: How to Increase Velocity for Rapid Results 107Part 3: Collaborative Power
Chapter 7: The Value Connection: What Your Customers and Employees Really Want 127
Chapter 8: One Big Happy Family: Suppliers, Your Untapped Resource 151
Chapter 9: Working Toward a Common Goal: Nurturing Internal Collaboration 171

Part 4: Capturing and Capitalizing on Innovation
Chapter 10: Innovation Where You Least Expect It:Tapping into Unexpected Sources and Strategies 193
Chapter 11: The Innovation Approach: From Conception to Outcome 215
Chapter 12: Empowerment Imperative: Transitioning from Thinking to Doing 231

Notes 249
Index 251

In today’s competitive global environment, it takes more than the pursuit of operational excellence for a business to succeed. If you want to maximize your potential, improve your productivity, and increase your profits—for the long haul—you need to engage your people who offer the best ideas, sharpest insights, and smartest solutions available. In other words, you need to empower your employees.

This practical guide from an experienced leader in Operational Management fuses traditional operational tactics with the popular growing field of employee empowerment. This unique, integrated approach has proven to be the best method for surviving in the toughest of markets—and beating the competition at their own game.

With Operational Empowerment, you can:

* Build a continuous improvement community that works for everyone
* Help your employees connect with a powerful shared vision
* Tranform your culture and drive innovation from within
* Repeat and sustain peak performance and productivity
* Transition from thinking to doing
* Focus on what your customers and employees really want
* Tap into the greatest resource you will ever have: your people

Instead of looking for inspiration in other businesses’ best practices, author Shawn Casemore urges you to seek ideas and solutions internally—by engaging your own employees and challenging them to consistently introduce improvements that make their jobs easier, and your organization more productive. You’ll learn how to implement a structured approach to performance and productivity that disrupts the silo mentality, drives innovation, encourages collaboration, and empowers employees—to reach even higher levels of operational excellence. Along the way, you’ll find illuminating case studies of the world’s most empowering employers, from Black & Decker and PepsiCo to McDonald’s and Amazon. And you’ll discover proven strategies to turn simple human connections into company-wide initiatives that will inspire every employee to be the best they can possibly be.

More than any other management guide, Operational Empowerment shows forward-thinking leaders how to build a continuous improvement community that thrives on personal engagement—and survives on commitment and autonomy.