World Class Performance

World Class Performance
World class is a term coined by Dick Schonberger, consultant and author of Building a Chain of Customers, to describe organization which is consistently held in the highest regard by its customer, and can therefore compete successfully in world markets.

Tom Peters, another America, author of In Search of Excellence, Liberation Management and Beyond Hierarchy, describes these organizations as excellent.

They both agree that somehow, these organizations are consistently able to meet and often exceed their customers’ expectations.

This kind of exceptional performance cannot happen by chance; it must be made to happen by getting everyone in organization to work constantly toward that goal.

Why? Because customer expectations are constantly rising.

What we as consumers are delighted with today, we come to expect tomorrow and so any organizations that stands still on quality and customer service will soon fall behind.

Unfortunately, however, until recently most western organizations were saddled with a crippling handicap that had to be unburdened before they could hope to achieve excellence.

This handicap was an all-pervading heritage familiar to everyone at work.

It has always been there, we could not imagine life without it, and it was seldom questioned.

It was of course the ‘command and control’ system with these near the top of the tree making the decision for the rest lower down.

It’s incredible to think that towards the end of the twentieth century, most people at work in organizations of any size sill found themselves constrained by a structure first adopted thousands of years ago.

It was appropriate for the Roman army, and for businesses during the reign of Queen Victoria, because then, populations consisted, mostly of uneducated masses, with only a small, educated elite equipped to take charge of them.

But that changed half a century ago, with an educated majority in developed nations.

What a waste of potential: all those educated people in the lower half of the tree with ideas about their jobs and no opportunity to use them.
World Class Performance