Winner of The Shingo Research and Professional Publication Award!

After two decades in the trenches of helping companies design and build better, more efficient operations, Karen Martin has pinpointed why performance improvement programs usually fail: Chaos, the sneaky but powerful force that frustrates customers, keeps business leaders awake at night, and saps company morale.

In The Outstanding Organization, Karen offers a toolbox for combating chaos by creating the organizational conditions that will allow your improvement efforts to return greater gains.

Proven, practical, and surprisingly simple, Karen's system focuses on four key behaviors for organizational excellence - Clarity, Focus, Discipline, Engagement - that, once instilled into a company's DNA, open the door to sustainable growth and profit. This well-organized, inviting-to-read guide reveals everything you need to know about:

• How the lack of clarity and focus adds millions of dollars of unnecessary labor expense and slows progress on all fronts
• How you can gain a competitive edge by adopting the type of disciplined behaviors typically found in the military, science, law enforcement, sports, and the arts
• Why you should stop worrying about employee satisfaction - and start concerning yourself with employee engagement
• Why adopting various improvement approaches without building a foundation for success won't solve your problems - and will likely create more chaos

Although you don't like the chaos that you're currently coping with, you've probably come to accept it. You don't have to if you follow the path Karen lays out.

This no-nonsense book helps you get to the crux of the problem, so you can inject the sensible, disciplined calm that enables the levels of performance and innovation mandated by today's business environment - and help your organization become truly outstanding.