Wiring the Winning Organization

Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification

Description

“Elegant and simple. It’s a teacher’s best companion―a lesson plan for teaching the theory of performance.” ―Adm. John Richardson (ret.), from his foreword to the book

“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

 

 

About the author(s)

Gene Kim has been studying high-performing technology organizations since 1999. He was the founder and CTO of Tripwire, Inc., an enterprise security software company, where he served for 13 years. He is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author whose books have sold over 1 million copies. His works include Wiring the Winning Organization, The Unicorn Project, The Phoenix Project, The DevOps Handbook, and the Shingo Publication Award-winning Accelerate, among others. Since 2014, he has been the organizer of the DevOps Enterprise Summit (now the Enterprise Technology Leadership Summit), studying the technology transformations of large, complex organizations.

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.

Reviews

“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. This is more than a book—it’s a toolkit for transforming your organization and rising to the challenges of our ever-changing landscape.”

David Silverman, President of American Atheists, CEO of CrossLead, coauthor of Team of Teams

“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, author of The Toyota Way

“A great piece of work! …the authors not only provide an encompassing schema for those looking to drive performance by improving operations, but they also help take practices developed for particular industries and functions and generalize them across all contexts. The guidance they provide is outstanding.”

Joel Podolny, CEO of Honor Education and former VP & Dean of Apply University

“Having spent the majority of my thirty-five-year US Navy career and subsequent private industry career working in large complex industrial organizations, what Kim and Spear have written completely resonates with me. I wish I had read this book decades ago; it would have helped me be a better leader.”

RADM Mark R. Whitney, US Navy (ret.), USN Executive Director of Hampton Roads Maritime Industrial Base Ecosystem

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