Five Prerequisites For Excellence

The MBE approach is holistic and focuses on doing the right things in the right order. The 80 or so current international frameworks are also holistic, each with 7-9 common criteria with which we agree. However, we simplify and integrate these 7-9 criteria to form just 5 all-encompassing Prerequisites for full business excellence in any SME. This makes the criteria more accessible and memorable for SMEs.

All the current international frameworks are designed to help businesses measure how well they are performing against their 7-9 criteria for excellence. Unfortunately, they are devoid of guidelines on how best to implement their stated criteria.

In stark contrast, the MBE approach gives you a fast start with early gains. Critical mass is progressively reached across all 5 Prerequisites within just two years. From then on, you simply consolidate what you have learned and reap the rapidly compounding net benefits.

Our research into the take-up rate of the international frameworks suggests that the effective market penetration of business excellence in SMEs globally is only about 1-2%. We believe the main reasons why the international reference frameworks are not popular among the myriad of SMEs today are that they are too complex and costly to implement and take far too long to make a substantial impact on the business.

SMEs cannot simply be treated as small versions of large businesses because they have unique characteristics. Here are some of them:

1. They often have limited financial resources to invest in new ways of doing things.

2. Most employee training is unstructured, ad-hoc, and in-house, delivered with little or no professional support staff.

3. Owners / CEOs / Managers often spend most of their time working IN the business, with little time to work ON the business.

4. Owners / CEOs / Managers often try to control every aspect of the business and fail to delegate enough.

5. Immature or irrelevant processes and ineffective IT support systems often result in reactive fire-fighting when things go wrong.

6. A top-down, hierarchical approach to strategy deployment is often aggravated by the inability to allocate resources flexibly and swiftly across organisational unit boundaries to where they are needed most.

We have developed our own MBE reference framework and MBE approach that together address these characteristics..