Bernard Baruch once said, “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Likewise, “transformation” has become a buzzword today. It is unfortunate that it is being misused and overmarketed through books, articles, conferences, and other media. It is often substituted incorrectly to represent any small or incremental change in the performance of any process, product, or service. Specific process-improvement tools and methodologies that are best suited for incremental and transitional change are promoted as silver bullets for a transformational change. This has led to a lot of confusion and frustration in the minds of business leaders, practitioners, staff, and other professionals as they struggle to implement these tools and methodologies in their organizations but fail to achieve the results of transformation.
At the same time, the role of courage in leadership has often been underplayed in a transformational journey. Most literature on change management and transformation mentions the importance of stakeholder engagement, senior management commitment, and leadership buy-in, but fails to recognize courage as a key attribute of leaders when the odds to succeed are high.
As a practitioner of business excellence for more than 20 years, I wrote this book, which is one of the first of its kind, to wade through the confusion among leaders on selecting the type of change approach that will get the best results in their organization and how the approach to transformational change is different from incremental and transitional change. Senior leaders and practitioners will benefit the most from reading this book as I share my experiences from leading several small- and large-scale organization transformations in multiple industries across different countries. I explain how to establish a robust foundation for a journey toward excellence and to integrate strategy into daily operations. Also, I discuss what it means to be a courageous leader while overseeing change in difficult situations and what leaders do differently to put their organization on a path to excellence and cultural transformation.
In this book, I have shared a few custom-designed models and frameworks implemented at a hospital in Canada, which propelled the organization further ahead in their transformational journey compared to other organizations that started much earlier. The innovative model combined best practices and principles from Malcolm Baldrige, Shingo, Lean, Six Sigma, Balanced Scorecard, accreditation, change management, patient and family-centered care, the Competing Values Framework, the LEADS framework, and the project management body of knowledge.
It has been my endeavor that the book serves as a practical guide and not a cookbook for senior executive leaders and organizational excellence practitioners, who wish to embark on or are in various stages of their journey toward organizational excellence and cultural transformation. Readers will be guided through 26 elements necessary for establishing a robust foundation and an additional set of 22 management system elements required to create and sustain a culture of quality across the organization. For leaders in healthcare, I have put together a framework to support the implementation of the four core concepts of patient and family-centered care, namely, dignity and respect, information sharing, participation, and collaboration. In addition, I have included several examples with creative visuals and ready-to-use templates, as well as standard works, models, guiding principles, and strategies that are based on best practices to assist you in your transformational journey.
Sensei in Japanese means “teacher” and gyaan in Sanskrit means “knowledge.” Brief notes labeled “Sensei Gyaan” have been interspersed throughout the book to provide valuable tips to the reader based on my experiential learning over the past two decades. When people ask me what I do, I tell them “whatever it takes.” All my life I have worked as a porter—portering and transferring knowledge from one area to another, from one department to another, from one organization to another, from one industry to another, from one hospital to another, from one province to another, and from one country to another. This is what I have done all my life and I am passionate about what I do as a porter. The pace and approach changed from one implementation to another, depending upon how soon the organization needed to see the results of transformation.
Remember, there is only one way to learn. It’s through action. Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “There are many ways of going forward but only one way of standing still.” In the animated movie, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” the character Laverne says to Quasi, “Life’s not a spectator sport. If watchin’ is all you’re gonna do, then you’re gonna watch your life go by without ya.”
My humble submission to all readers is to employ six honest serving-men like Rudyard Kipling did—What, Why, When, How, Where, and Who. They will teach you all you need to know. And dare to have courage. Sometimes the smallest step in the right direction ends up as a biggest step of your life. Tip toe if you must, but take the step.
Happy learning!
Sumeet Kumar