Business Essentials

In order to enhance organisation performance and achieve sustained success, organizations must focus on both their customers and their interested parties. Organizations can establish this focus by trying to understand the current and future requirements and expectations of both their customers and their interested parties and by constantly trying to meet these requirements and exceed these expectations.

Organizations must ensure that suitable leadership is provided at all levels. Suitable leadership is provided whenever leaders at all levels establish a unity of purpose and whenever they create an environment that encourages people to pursue a common direction and achieve a common set of objectives.

By establishing a common purpose, leaders can ensure that all strategies, policies, processes, and resources are aligned and being used to pursue a common direction and to achieve a common set of objectives.

Organizations must be able to create and deliver value. In order to do so they must have people who are competent, they must enhance their knowledge and skills, and they must manage them effectively by empowering them, by encouraging their involvement and engagement at all levels, and by recognizing their achievements.

Organizations must use a process approach to manage their activities. The process approach is a management strategy. When managers use this approach, it means that they manage and control their processes, the interactions between these processes, and the inputs and outputs that tie these processes together. It also means that they manage these interactions as a system. When this approach is applied to quality management, it means that they manage their processes and their process interactions as a coherent quality management system.

Organizations must encourage and support improvement. If they wish to maintain current levels of performance, if they wish to respond to changing conditions, and if they wish to identify, create, and exploit new opportunities, organizations must establish and sustain an ongoing focus on improvement.

Organisations must establish an evidence-based decision making process. Decision making is evidence-based whenever multiple types of input are gathered from multiple sources, whenever facts are identified, whenever data is analyzed objectively, whenever cause and effect relationships are examined, whenever potential unintended consequences are considered, and whenever all of this is used to make corporate decisions.

Organizations must manage their relationship with suppliers, partners, and other interested parties. Relationships must be carefully managed because suppliers, partners, and other interested parties can influence corporate performance and undermine corporate success.