Bill addresses the balance between transactional business processes and people while introducing the four lenses through which he coaches Operational Excellence: Daily Execution, Strategy Deployment (Policy Deployment), Root Cause Countermeasure and the Team (People).

Bill makes a clear distinction between the common failures of classic business strategy and strategy deployment (policy deployment). Critical to strategy deployment is the definition of breakthrough work(s) and the simple communication and tracking of annual breakthroughs and their respective targets to improve.

Bill speaks to the critical nature of day-to-day profitable business operations and its importance relative to breakthrough and strategy deployment. Further, Bill presents a simple example of a companywide visual management tool he uses to celebrate successes as well as identify business problems to potentially deploy root cause countermeasures against.

Bill addresses the frequent occurrence of problems and the criticality of deploying an effective team problem-solving method: Root Cause Countermeasure (RCCM). Team-structured problem-solving is a common eight-step process, language, and toolkit that enables teams to more quickly identify, prioritize, contain, and prevent potential problems from reaching customers, ultimately allowing faster return to, and greater focus on, revenue-generating daily operation.

Bill relates how he creates a reinforcing loop of positive behavior and positive execution through effective people strategy, tied to the business strategy. Bill also shares some insight into how he enables the team (employees) to better align with the business leadership, an action that leads to improved team performance and, ultimately, happier employees and customers.

Bill speaks to leaders of emerging and small-to-medium-size businesses through two case studies (emerging regions or markets, business recovery/business growth), explaining when to call on Operational Excellence.