Hillel Glazer - High Performance Operations: Leverage Compliance to Lower Costs, Increase Profits, and Gain Competitive Advantage

Hillel Glazer sets about busting the myth that regulated industries and high performance operations are mutually exclusive. As a tax payer, I personally hope this book is widely read and its ideas rapidly adopted!

David J. Anderson, author of Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business

Hillel Glazer has deftly synthesized all that hes learned from flying, building places, engineering complex systems, and years of consulting to help organizations to be lean and focused on performance. I believe Hillel is a clear-eyed radical who loves what he wants to reform. You can sense his exasperation at all that is wasteful and wrong in organizations, even as he patiently helps us to find a profitable way through it.

Eileen C. Forrester, author of CMMI for Services, Carnegie Mellon University

This is one book Ive definitely been waiting for! Hillel Glazer shares the results of his reflections on dozens of improvement journeys, identifying what separates the operationally excellent organization from the wannabes. This book can help make your CMMI or ISO-based improvement program result in superior performance and compliance for free!

Michael D. Konrad, PhD, Chief Architect, Capability Maturity Model Integration, Carnegie Mellon University

Hillel Glazers easy-to-read book emphasizes systems thinking in improving performancecritical key to success in our increasingly complex and challenging business environment.

Paul D. Nielsen, Director and CEO, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Compliance, love it or hate it, whether with the laws of nature or the laws of man, can be embraced without sacrificing productivity or profits. Not possible? Wrong. Not only will Hillel show you that it is not necessary to sacrifice productivity, he will show you how to enhance productivity and profits within the defined constraints. In order to understand how this is possible one must first recognize certain facts. First, constraints, no matter their origin, create both intended and unintended consequences. Second, most problems have optimal but not perfect solutions. And third, repeatable processes with predictable outcomes are key to consistent, high quality performance.

The same concepts I was taught as a young, aspiring engineer Hillel has refined, defined, and articulated in a concept he calls solution engineering. In simple terms and logical examples Hillel explains how solution engineering and its application to the modern enterprise becomes an enabling force that results in high performance teams and profitable businesses.

Robert Rosenbaum, President and Executive Director, Maryland Technology Development Corporation

Hillel has written a very important book. Readers should not limit themselves or be misled by the focus in the subtitle regarding compliance. This is a book about total system performance regardless of compliance issues. It is clear, even in the absence of compliance compulsion, that the ideas in High Performance Operations are not only useful but critical to providing value to employees, customers, and owners in any business. The space devoted to understanding operations as a system rather than a collection of parts is the key to success, again, regardless of compliance issues. Essentially this book is a wolf in sheeps clothing. It is profound and covers many important aspects of business. There are very few books with both the scope and the depth of what is covered in High Performance Operations.

Jeffrey Schraeder, Viable Vision Expert, Goldratt Consulting

Hillel Glazer has a unique way of taking the theoretical, the esoteric, and turning it into something that can actually be of practical usethats a rarity these daysand he does it in a style that is easily understandable. As a practitioner myself, out in the real world where we have to actually get product out the door, his insights are much appreciated and often applied.

Hillel was one of the first to recognize that high performance and compliance are not mutually exclusive. Its a battle hes been fighting for years nowIm glad to see that some of those walls between the high performance camp and the compliance camp are finally starting to come down. This book should help speed that process along.

Jim Shaver, Senior Director, Development Process Improvement, Office of the CTO, McKesson Corporation

By applying key systems engineering principles to process development, High Performance Operations takes a pragmatic systems approach to doing business in todays compliance-heavy environment. Hillel Glazer provides a refreshingly different take on the path to business excellence.

Richard Turner, Distinguished Service Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology, and coauthor of Balancing Agility and Discipline and CMMI Survival Guide

Leverage Compliance to Lower Costs, Increase Profits, and Gain Competitive Advantage

Hillel Glazer

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2012 by Pearson Education, Inc.
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Printed in the United States of America

First Printing September 2011

ISBN-10: 0-13-266988-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-13-266988-3

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Glazer, Hillel, 1968
High performance operations : leverage compliance to lower costs, increase profits, and gain competitive
advantage / Hillel Glazer. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-13-277988-3 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Organizational effectiveness. 2. Systems engineering. 3. Cost. 4. Profit. I. Title.
HD58.9.G593 2012
658.1'2--dc23