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.