The Daily Pursuit of Excellence is the second edition of my first book, The Power of Goal ZERO. In the first edition, the focus was primarily on improving an organization's performance and achieving Operational Excellence. In this second edition, I have increased the focus on you. This book will help you to increase your effectiveness, influence those around you, improve your opportunity for advancement, and contribute to the success of your company. The book will also help you to understand how successful companies operate and to connect the dots of why things are done a certain way.

     While reading, think in terms of your particular business. The principles and examples are universal and apply to good leadership in every context. If you work in a manufacturing or service company, a hotel, a restaurant, a department store, or any other kind of business, the concepts will help you and your company to improve. The book is filled with real life examples to help illustrate key points.

     The Daily Pursuit of Excellence is about life. The book is for individuals who want to make a difference in their lives and help deliver extraordinary results in their organizations. I've included a plethora of tips and proven techniques in the book. It doesn't matter if you are a beginning employee, a middle manager, or a CEO, this book is designed to help build on what you already know and take your performance to the next level.

     I was fortunate to spend a career with three leading international companies: Dow  Chemical, Shell, and LyondellBasell Industries. I served as Global Vice President for each of these companies in a variety of Manufacturing, Environment, Health, Safety, Security, Operational Excellence, and Sustainable Development roles. My job was to help create the right culture and drive performance improvement globally.  

     My career offered the opportunity for me to interact with and learn from literally thousands of individuals around the world. I am still learning today from my board of director experiences. I've met excellent people on every continent and learned that good ideas come from a wide variety of places. My constant obsession was to capture all of these good ideas and best practices and leverage to others. I was fortunate to have a job in which my team and I were able to assemble these practices into a common, global way of doing work—a management system. I now feel uniquely qualified to share these learnings for your benefit.

     There isn't a silver bullet to achieving excellence. Many people and organizations work hard, but don't have a focus on the right areas. We learned to simplify the approach by a daily pursuit of excellence in 4 key focus areas—leadership, people, systems, and culture. These four focus areas are interrelated and impact each other in powerful ways. You must have a good management system that contains the expectations for how work should be done, a strong culture that supports the system, people that deliver results, and of course, strong leadership.

     In this book, I will help you to understand how successful companies operate. I'll describe the importance of the 4 key focus areas and provide numerous tips and suggestions under each area. This book will help you to understand how you can have influence in each area and improve the performance of both yourself and your organization. If everyone in the organization understands these concepts, demonstrates ownership, and works daily on each one, amazing results will come. The book can serve as an ongoing reference as you progress through your career.

     Since the launch of the first book, I've continued to see organizations with poor results. I've seen devastating and tragic incidents impacting individuals and organizations across all industries. People have needlessly lost their lives or been severely injured due to lack of discipline, poor practices, a culture of sloppiness, and a variety of other reasons. Quality problems have created significant issues with customers and disrupted supply chains. Top tier football teams have won a major game one week and then fallen apart the next. The coaches and players don't seem like the same team week to week. It's obvious that some individuals and leaders don't "get it" and don't understand what it takes to achieve consistency in performance on a regular basis.

     Each of the readers of this book will be at different stages in his or her careers and will be working in different industries. Therefore, to help level set and get everyone on the same page, here are a few important terms and definitions that will be used throughout the book:

• Operational Excellence—This is an overarching term and strategic objective for an organization. Quality, service, reliability, customer satisfaction, safety, and cost control all fall under the umbrella of Operational Excellence. This singular term helps create alignment and a clear expectation of performance excellence for people and the organization.

• Management System—A management system defines how things "should be done." A good system is a standardized way of doing work and should be simplified as much as possible. The management system is an organized collection of the company vision, mission, strategy, code of conduct, technology, standards, requirements, procedures, tools, and many other items. The elements of a system build on best practices and provide clear expectations for people in the organization. A good management system should be an active component of everyday work and must be continually maintained and updated.

• Culture—The culture in an organization defines how things "are actually done." The way people behave, the way people treat each other, their sense of ownership, their focus on the customer, their performance, and their insistence on excellence are all indicators of the culture in an organization.

     This book is designed to help you and your colleagues create a culture of excellence. A culture of excellence establishes the environment for achieving extraordinary results. You want a culture in which every person acts like an owner, meets the organization's expectations, conducts him or herself in the right manner, treats each other with respect, and exceeds customers' needs. If you get the culture right, everything else becomes much easier.

     In many organizations, there is a disconnect between the expectations of the company and the culture. When the culture and norms do not match the strategy and expectations in an organization, success is difficult to achieve. When people's behaviors and work are aligned with the expectations of the organization's management system, you are on your way to achieving a culture of excellence.

     I felt the sense of urgency to take this book to the next level and help get the key points across in a clearer manner. I want you to be the best you can be and to drive rapid progress and transformation with the people you work with. You can make an incredible impact as an individual and as an influential leader no matter what your position is in your organization. I've seen the power of individual leadership at all levels in driving and achieving excellence. You can make a positive difference with others, whether on or off the job. Further, if you develop a coalition of like-minded individuals, you can help your company create a culture that's fun to work in, achieves excellence at all times, and wins. The culture in some of the best departments I've worked in was driven from the bottom up.

     My greatest pleasure from the first edition of my book was getting feedback from readers. One person, early in her career, said the book totally changed her way of thinking. She said the book helped her to understand the big picture and to see why matching the culture with the expectations of an organization is so important. Small business leaders said they began applying the principles immediately. Many leaders in companies bought the book for their employees and said they were using the book to create alignment on their approach to excellence.

     An interesting approach in several companies has been to organize group discussions around a particular section of the book. The section in the book provides the basis for the discussion, but, more importantly, the people discuss what they are doing regarding the particular topic and ways they can improve. Some universities are beginning to use the book in their classes and listing the book as required leadership reading. The overall feedback has been overwhelming and extremely gratifying.

     Instead of writing a new book, I decided to make this one better. In this second edition, many new stories and techniques have been added for establishing the system and culture necessary for individuals and organizations to truly achieve excellence. You will learn some new techniques and be reminded of concepts that you already know. Use this book as a reference and refer back to it often.

     Simplicity is a key theme in the book. Simplified procedures, processes, programs, and systems are always better for improved understanding and comprehension. The four keys to successful organizations are summed up in my Operational Excellence Model formula:

Operational Excellence =

Leadership + People + Systems + Culture

     It's vitally important to understand the importance each of these components plays in achieving excellence. This high-level concept is simple and easy to remember. Simply put, the culture and systems help create an environment in which leadership and people work and deliver superior performance.

     I've organized the chapters in the book to provide tips and suggestions for how you can drive progress within each of these tenets of the Operational Excellence Model. Make no mistake, achieving excellence is hard work and requires a daily, relentless pursuit. Utilizing a proven framework helps your organization to maintain a balanced focus on the areas that will accelerate improvement and help you to achieve success.

     The Daily Pursuit of Excellence is a condensed version of successful techniques learned in a 50+ year career of helping to drive improvement in multinational organizations. The book describes a practical way to be a results focused leader and drive safety, reliability, quality, and superior performance. I provide a lot of large company examples, but the principles apply in all sizes of organizations.

     The topics covered in this book help drive behavior and culture change in a positive way. Important concepts include building on a common theme, utilizing consistent terminology, driving simplicity, listening, communicating, and remaining practical.

    "Safety" is used as an example or metaphor throughout the book. You must never allow anyone to get seriously injured. A serious injury impacts everyone: the injured person, family, friends, and co-workers in the organization. "Nothing is more important than the safety of our employees, customers, and the public." You hear this quite often. Some people just say it, but I want you to live it every day.

    Safety is a value in an organization. If you understand this concept, then you will understand the value that culture plays in an organization. Culture becomes the company, thereby helping to drive Operational Excellence and Goal ZERO performance.

    A key message of the book is that the pre-conditions for achieving excellence in safety are the same as for achieving excellence in everything else. You need strong leadership, competent people operating flawlessly, a good management system of best practices, solid technology, well-maintained assets, and a winning culture.

    When you have each of these, you will not only achieve superior safety performance, but you will also reduce defects, increase reliability, improve quality, lower costs, enhance the customer experience, and drive value to the bottom line. It makes perfect sense to passionately lead with safety. Leading with safety protects people and also helps to achieve the other objectives important to your organization. When you read the examples regarding safety, challenge yourself to also think in terms of the other performance areas that are important to you.

     My approach in the book is to illustrate key concepts in short, practical sections. I could have gone into much more detail in each section, but the book would have been too long. I utilize personal stories and anecdotes to illustrate the context and provide examples of how you, too, can help create a culture of excellence at any level. Imagine yourself in a similar situation when you read the stories. Demonstrating leadership and providing a sense of ownership for individuals at all levels are important elements for success. You want everyone to act as if they were an owner.

     The principles enable rapid transformation in any organization. In today's competitive environment, individuals and organizations must be best in class to compete and win.

This book is written with great humility. I certainly don't want to give the impression that I have all the answers or that these recommendations are the only way to conduct your business. My life lessons have come from the school of hard knocks. I made many mistakes along the way and learned from each one. You may not agree with some of the recommendations and that's okay; diversity of thought is good and an important part of achieving excellence.

My stories and experiences are openly shared in the spirit of learning and improving, especially for young people. I use "we" throughout the book to describe examples because our terrific teams developed the processes together and drove results.

    I'll also admit that I learned a lot while writing this book as I researched deeper into various topics. Giving presentations to organizations for the first edition of the book and listening to feedback also provided learning experiences. Hopefully, you will use this book as one of your key references and as a virtual mentor throughout your career.

     We've all read many books on leadership and organizational effectiveness throughout our careers. I always felt if I learned one or two tips, then buying and reading the book was worth my time. I guarantee you will take away more than one or two tips and best practices that you can begin implementing today.