EXCELLENCE: The world’s best kept secret blueprint for success

​There is no question of the value that the ISO 9001 international standard for quality management has made to the world we live in. It drives the global supply chains that provide the food we eat, vehicles we drive, electronics goods we use each day, and medical devices that we take for granted today. 

There are $1.1m organisations in over 200 countries (at 31 Dec 2016) that are ISO 9001 certified. ​In a meta-study, researchers compared the growth of ISO 9001 companies over their first 10-years after being certified to US S&P 500 companies. They found that ISO certified companies grew twice as fast as the S&P 500 listed companies.

An independent study has been done on the benefit of using the (criteria for performance) excellence framework in growing businesses. Researchers found that companies using this excellence framework outperformed the S&P500 index by 440%. They grow more than twice as fast as ISO 9001 certified companies. Just a few thousand organisations globally have achieved levels of excellence despite excellence frameworks having been around for over 30 years.

The most valuable part of the excellence framework is that it provides a quantitative measure of the maturity of any organisation, and answers the question most leadership teams want to know, ‘how are we tracking towards becoming world best practice?’ Excellence is also important for providing the means to separate best practice out from mediocre and poor practice, enabling sharing to take place necessary to lift the performance of industry sectors and whole economies.

In the 1970s the average S&P 500 listed company lasted 67 years. By 2016 the average life of a company had dropped to just 17 years. Building a sustainable business today has become challenging with the accelerating uptake of new technology by new startups. Increasingly businesses are facing global competitors that are using the latest technology to provide more appropriate solutions for your customers faster and cheaper than you can. Speed is of the essence for growing businesses in today’s environment.  

​Only excellence is proven to grow businesses over 4 times as quickly as S&P 500 listed companies and over twice as fast as ISO 9001 certifed companies. Global competitiveness of companies, industries and nations will become even more reliant on excellence in the future.