The Principles of An Excellence Agenda

Earlier this week I was working with a client on their Excellence Agenda.  As we talked about the concepts and clarified what it was and how it worked, the motivation and excitement took off.  Coming out of the meeting I realized I needed to find a better way to tell the Excellence Agenda story.  Yesterday, while walking the dogs (walking has a great impact on creativity) I had an "aha" moment and was able to simplify An Excellence Agenda to a series of basic principles.  So here they are:

1. Excellence isn't everything, it's the only thing.
2. Job 1 of every executive and manager is "to create environments in which excellence can happen"
3. Excellence is a journey, not a destination
4. Excellence = meeting requirements
5. Excellence does not equal perfect: Excellence is an outcome, Perfect is a target (generally unachievable)
6. There is a proven process for building an Excellence Agenda, that has definable steps and that engages the participants to build buy-in and execution commitment. 

I am looking forward to elaborating on these topics over the next week or so...

In the meantime check out the link about my Granddaughter: lifewithlol

Speaking Engagement

Next week I am speaking at the Social Media in Government Conference.  I am tag teaming with David Paul, Director of Economic Development, City of Brockville.  Here's the link:  Social Media in Government.  I will do a post on the conference next week.  Hope to see you there.

Update

It has been a while since I posted some significant content.  So an update is in order.  I have been so busy with new initiatives that I have neglected the blog.  But that is about to change, I have a number of posts waiting to be finalized and posted.  So some updates.

In December of 2011, I was invited to join Delta Partners Management Consultants in Ottawa, Canada. It has been a huge move.  Delta Partners brings a trusted adviser approach to their work and they have an amazing content repository focused on organizational design, leadership and change management.  You can see their material at www.deltapartners.ca.  One of my first assignments with Delta Partners was to attend the Food Manufacturing and Safety Forum in Dallas Texas at the end of January.  Preparing for that and the follow up from that conference has been quite exciting.  Lots of very interesting things happening in that area.  I have also had a number of proposals and other projects to work on.

Friday of last week I, along with a number of colleagues from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency, was given a Certificate of Merit for contributions to the development of the Agency program area performance measurement system.  The project was initiated by Bart Bilmer five years ago to provide the food programs with a consistent approach to performance measurement and integrated program reporting.  The goal was to move programs from a compliance mindset to a performance measurement culture. My role was to work with all of the programs to define their performance measurement logic models, key performance indicators and develop the integrated reporting system. The system was ultimately connected and linked into the Agency corporate performance measurement system that reports to the Parliament of Canada.  Over that time the Treasury Board Secretariat moved the rating on the Agency performance measurement system from "Needs Attention" to "Strong", the highest level of achievement.  The Certificate of Merit was a nice way to express appreciation for the contribution of everyone on the team.

Check out http://www.aliconferences.com/conf/social_media_govt_canada0312/index.htm.  I will be supporting the presentation from the City of Brockville on using social media in a municipal context.

Stay tuned.  There is more to come over the coming weeks.

Caring

An Excellence Agenda starts with caring.  In this blog post, Seth Godin hits it on the head on the impact of caring.  This is the line that really struck me:

Caring, it turns out, is a competitive advantage, and one that takes effort, not money.


An Excellence Advantage is about an investment in comittment and effort, not about capital expenditure.  Check the link here:

  Seth Godin: Caring