About The Book
One size does NOT fit all! Jack Welch is smart, but he doesn’t know your business like you do. Have you or your company invested heavily in process improvement, only to be disappointed by cost overruns and (lack of) results?
“It’s not that the tools of Lean and Six Sigma aren’t useful,” assert authors Larry Solow and Brenda Fake in their groundbreaking book, “WHAT WORKS FOR GE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU: Using Human Systems Dynamics to Build a Culture of Process Improvement (Productivity Press, 2010). “… problems arise when these linear tools are implemented in a “one size fits all” way in complex human organizations.” Solow and Fake, with a combined 50 years of internal and external organization change experience, offer a new set of theory, practices, and tools to deal with complex realities of messy human organizations.
WHAT WORKS FOR GE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU outlines an innovative new approach based on Human Systems Dynamics (HSD). Derived from the “new” sciences of complexity, chaos, and self-emerging criticality, HSD addresses the complexity of people and the organizations in which they work. It offers a pattern-based approach that provides greater flexibility to adapt to the initial and ever-changing conditions that organizations are experiencing today. Their ideas are helpful whether readers are trying to recoup their existing investment in Lean Six Sigma or considering an LSS implementation from scratch.
WHAT WORKS FOR GE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU provides a realistic framework for understanding the “differences that make a difference” in process improvement. After detailing the “failure modes” of traditional implementations, Solow and Fake provide brief introductory descriptions of Lean, Six Sigma, and Human Systems Dynamics. They then tell a “case story” – a fictitious (though derived from painful real-life experiences) story that highlights the dynamics of a traditional Lean Six Sigma implementation.
They then re-tell the story utilizing the insights provided by HSD and their consulting experience. This allows the reader a clear opportunity to see what is the “same and different” between the two approaches.
WHAT WORKS FOR GE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU provides a provocative and thoughtful critique of the current state of the process improvement implementation. If properly implemented, the emergent, adaptive, pattern-based strategy Solow and Fake outline has a far greater chance of success than traditional approaches in today’s turbulent business environment. Built on solid research and a new paradigm of complex and adaptive change, WHAT WORKS FOR GE MAY NOT WORK FOR YOU provides an invaluable set of tools that offer new possibilities for those trying to improve their teams and organization.