Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification
About this ebook
“This book is a must-read that deeply informs leaders on how to create great systems for outstanding performance and to win.” ―Jeffrey K. Liker, PhD, author of The Toyota Way, 2nd edition
A 2024 Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist and Shortlisted for the 2024 Business Book Award.
Forget vision, grit, or culture. Wiring the Winning Organization reveals the hidden circuitry that drives organizational excellence.
Drawing on decades of meticulous research of high-performing organizations and cross-population surveys of tens of thousands of employees, award-winning authors Gene Kim and Dr. Steven J. Spear introduce a groundbreaking new theory of organizational management. Organizations win by using three mechanisms to slowify, simplify, and amplify, which systematically moves problem-solving from high-risk danger zones to low-risk winning zones.
Wiring the Winning Organization shines an investigative light on some of the most famous organizations, including Toyota, Amazon, Apple, and NASA, revealing how leaders create the social wiring that enables exceptional results.
This is not feel-good inspiration or armchair philosophy but a data-driven prescriptive playbook for creating excellence grounded in real-world results and proven theory. This is the rare business book that delivers concrete tools―not platitudes―to convert mediocrity into mastery.
“All organizations, large and small, public and private, are overwhelmed by complexity, multiple priorities, conflicting goals, shifting landscapes, and constrained resources. Kim and Spear lay out an amazing vision of the social circuitry for organizations to not only handle this but thrive while doing so.” ―Phil Venables, Chief Information Security Officer, Google Cloud; former Board Director, Goldman Sachs Bank
“This book clearly teaches you how to rewire your organization to move with focused, sustained urgency and win!” ―Courtney Kissler, SVP Customer and Retail Technology, Starbucks
“In a world where complexity is the norm, Kim and Spear provide the essential guide for those in need of a compass for the maze of today’s business environment.” ―David Silverman, CEO of CrossLead, co-author of Team of Teams
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About the author
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.
