One of the best investments you can make

There are too many great companies and good managers getting into trouble every day because their bottom line profits are out of control.

What if you could change that?

Here's how:

This fourth edition of Achieving World-Class Profit Improvement is the most up to date version of the book in global use since 1999.  Key content and particularly that associated with successful implementation has been expanded and refined through continuing experience and research.  The fundamentals have withstood the test of time and practice and continue to ring true and bring results.  Our 2007 white-paper, “Profit Improvement Executive Analysis: Insights Into a Century of Cost Reduction and Profit Improvement” strongly reinforced the foundation of the principles embodied in the Profit Improvement Process.

The book was written out of necessity.  At least that's the way I look at it.  One only has to stand still today to be overrun by change.  Technologies and markets are moving at a frenetic pace.  Human nature shows us, however, that most of us resist change…so progress is slowed or even stopped…and people and companies are run over.

If you are reading this as part of the training process for a profit improvement initiative, consider yourself lucky to have management with the initiative to take positive action.  If you are reading this because you are in a survival mode, be aggressive in applying these tools and methods quickly.  Keep your eye on the objective that you must save the core to have a future.  If you are reading this while business is great and you are wondering where you would ever get the time and resources to do the work, recognize that the results of a continuous profit improvement process will help you succeed in the short term as well as the long term.  If you can become a cost-effective organization now, you can better support new growth.  Don't wait until you are forced into a survival mode.  I've helped companies in both extremes and I'll tell you that survival is not the better choice.

A common thread through my personal work for over 30 years has been that of being a change agent or turn-around specialist in a wide variety of organizational settings.  In some cases change was required for growth and in others it was required for survival.  In the course of this work I have delivered in excess of $100,000,000 additional profits to employers and clients.

I've had the fun of enabling growth, increasing market share, fostering new products and services, and ensuring the vitality of companies.  I've also had the heartache of administering CPR to patients that were just too far gone to resuscitate.  I now ask that companies do the right things today so they will have a brighter future tomorrow.

Along the way, I compiled and tested the methods, models, and tools presented here.  They were drawn from a broad variety of resources.  When I started, in the early 1970's there just wasn't a lot written about profit improvement and efficiency but my engineering education really paid off.  The scientific approach can be successfully applied to almost any system and I have had a ball making improvements that others thought impossible.  I continued my education with extensive graduate studies in business as I moved around the country. 

In the mid-1990's I became aware of a force just as powerful as the scientific method…creativity and innovation in the form of the Creative Problem Solving model and the Center for Studies in Creativity at the State University College of New York in Buffalo.  Aha, as we say when innovation strikes like a brainstorm!  I found creativity tools that tap the power of the human intellect and unleash the ability for individuals and organizations to solve problems and create new things in a highly efficient and effective manner.  I also found language and process to surround many of the improvement methods that I had been using intuitively for so many years.  I became the 136^th person in the world to be granted an MS in Creativity and Innovation.  This book recognizes that the new use of old tools and the new use of new tools can both be very creative…and effective.

I have seen too many jobs lost and too many lives diminished by unnecessary business failures.  These world-class principles will help you succeed…if you apply them.

My advice to you is to skim this, read in depth what you want, adapt and use what you can, and don't make your work any more difficult than it has to be.  Great secrets sometimes lie hidden in simplicity.

We use money to keep score but profit improvement and business improvement is all about people.

Steven C. Martin

President & CEO
Business Solutions - The Positive Way

One of the best investments you can make -
for about the price of a college textbook

If you could tap into the good-will and intellectual power of all your people to strengthen your company and increase profits at the same time, why wouldn't you?  This book will show you how.