State of Readiness

Operational Excellence as Precursor to Becoming a High-Performance Organization

Joseph F. Paris Jr.

Accelerated Strategy Development and Execution
The company of today has its supply chains and finances stretched further around the globe than ever before while simultaneously having increasing pressures to drive value across a complicated and fluid set of metrics and deliver innovations, products, and services more quickly and reliably. The competitive advantage belongs to the companies that can quicken their vision-building and strategy-execution efforts—the ones that can identify challenges more swiftly and accelerate their decision making so they are better able to formulate and deploy responses decisively yet with greater agility. To successfully accomplish this, companies will have to prioritize creating a culture of leadership that strengthens communication skills and emphasizes systems thinking by building capacity and capability that cuts across the business smokestacks and permeates the entire organization.

In State of Readiness, Joseph F. Paris Jr. shares over thirty years of international business and operations experience and guides C-suite executives and business-operations and -improvement specialists on a path toward operational excellence, the organizational capability and situational awareness that is attained as the enterprise reaches a state of alignment for pursuing its strategies. In doing so, create a corporate culture that is committed to the continuous and deliberate improvement of company performance and the circumstances of those who work there—a precursor to becoming a high-performance organization.

Joseph F. Paris Jr. is a thought leader on the subject of operational excellence, a prolific writer, and a sought-after speaker around the world. Although he is an expert in the more granular facets of the discipline, he places a special emphasis on the keystone for success: the engagement of people.

His vehicles for change and delivering the promises of operational excellence include the following:

• The XONITEK group of companies, a consultancy helping companies around the globe
• The Operational Excellence Society, a think tank serving the operational excellence ecosystem
• The Operational Excellence LinkedIn group

In addition, Paris serves on the editorial board of The Lean Management Journal, the board of the Systems Science and Industrial Engineering Department at the Watson School of Engineering at Binghamton University, and the board of the Institute of Industrial Engineers’ Process Industries Division. He is an active member of the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering and the Association for Corporate Growth.