Re-investigating business excellence: Values, measures and a framework

Abstract

This paper revisits the nature of business excellence, explores the conceptual development and suggests a normative framework that better supports the measurement, management and delivery of competitive performance at the ‘world-class’ level. It stresses the importance of the firm-specific and situation-sensitive means of evaluation for excellence. The proposed model has four dimensions of operational excellence, strategic fit, capability to adapt and unique voice, which represent correspondingly the classical school, strategic school, dynamic school and individual school of business excellences. The major implication of the research is to understand business excellence from a balanced perspective. Empirical evidence from a mini-case is discussed to demonstrate the applicability and the potential business benefits.

Keywords:

• business excellence
• performance measure
• excellence model
• world-class organisation
• world-class framework