Operational Leadership

Operational Leadership examines the comprehensive combination of leadership and management behaviors needed to fundamentally improve how businesses get products and/or services developed, sold, delivered, and serviced. It is written for executives and graduate students and includes examples of both success and failure in improving operations, in the belief that while people are motivated by success stories, they often learn as much, or more, from the mistakes that others have made. This book integrates and extends key concepts in the literature on leadership and process management and applies them to the improvement of operational performance. The importance of viewing operations in the context of a company's key capabilities, or end-to-end processes, is emphasized where collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries is essential. It is proposed that performance-oriented organizations will come to recognize the need to appoint key senior executives as change agents, aligned with the company's core capabilities, to continuously improve and manage operational performance.