Business Excellence as the Key

Success Logics

In global competition, different success logics emerge – three of them shape industry particularly strongly:

• In the USA, competitive advantages arise primarily through willingness to experiment, risk-taking, and disruptive innovation. Ideas are tested early, decisions are made quickly, markets are actively shaped.
• China’s strength lies in speed, scaling, and consistent implementation. Viable approaches are rapidly industrialized and brought to market.
• Europe traditionally stands for quality, reliability, and a strong foundation of regulation, standards, and established management systems.

The advantages of the European logic are increasingly caught in a field of tension: What ensures stability limits adaptability, innovation, and speed. European industry is not losing competence, but implementation power and impact – even though many organizations possess excellent prerequisites.

Causes

The causes lie not only in the external environment and regulation – critical levers are often found within organizations themselves:

• Organizations are not understood as a whole – improvements are made in sub-areas rather than in the overall context.
• Management systems are designed along individual focus perspectives – system standards are combined, but not consistently integrated.
• Cultures of risk mitigation, error avoidance, and excessive rule compliance prevent experimentation, learning, and development.

In leadership understanding, security takes precedence over courage, control is weighted higher than trust. The result: Organizations function, but are only limitedly effective and future-viable.

Organization as a Complete System

This is precisely where Business Excellence according to the Excellence Framework Europe (EFE) comes in: At the interplay of the organization as a complete system – because effectiveness & future viability emerge where …

• Orientation, culture, leadership, structure, value creation, impact, and change are consistently aligned with one another.
• Culture enables learning, responsibility, and innovation.
• Leadership provides orientation and empowers, rather than controls.
• A positive view of people makes trust the foundation of performance and collaboration.
• Speed emerges because decisions are made rapidly.
• Quality is utilized not as a constraint, but as a differentiating competitive advantage.

CONCLUSION

To unite innovation, speed, and quality and be sustainably future-viable, European industrial organizations do not need to become more American or Chinese – but rather make their own strengths consistently effective. Business Excellence, such as the Excellence Framework Europe, is a critical lever for this.

Expert and author

Dr. Werner Schachner
Senior Expert Business Excellence & Corporate Quality
for effective, future-viable organizations
Quality Austria Consulting GmbH
www.qualityaustria-consulting.com

Tel: +43 664 88760 530
Email: w.schachner@qualityaustria-consulting.com