How do some organizations break away from the pack while others fall further behind? After researching the successes and failures of organizations from the last 150 years, award-winning authors Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear, DBA, have unlocked the key to success.In their eagerly awaited book, Kim and Spear bring to light a new theory of high-achieving organizations. They examine how companies solve the most important problems better, faster, and easier than their competitors by quickly and regularly closing the gap between aspirations and real-world success. This book shows companies that are struggling to perform how to achieve the continual greatness seen in the best of the best. This groundbreaking theory of organizational advantage details three components: simplification, slowification, and amplification. These create coherence across large, complex organizations, empowering them to architect enviable success in the market.
Gene Kim is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author, researcher, and multiple award-winning CTO. He has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999 and was the founder and CTO of Tripwire for 13 years. He is the author of six books, The Unicorn Project (2019), and co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate (2018), The DevOps Handbook (2016), and The Phoenix Project (2013). Since 2014, he has been the founder and organizer of DevOps Enterprise Summit, studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and family. Steven J. Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High-Velocity Edge and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System. A Senior Lecturer at MIT's Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear's work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so that they know better and faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple "verticals" including heavy industry, high-tech design, bio-pharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness. High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System--which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives "Perfecting Patient Care System"--credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney's "Engineering Standard Work"--which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy's high velocity learning line of effort--an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the 'hit to lead' phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.
