"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
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
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.Dr. Steven J. Spear, DBA, MS, MS, is a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and author of influential publications like The High-Velocity Edge, "Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System," and "Fixing Healthcare from the Inside, Today." An advisor to corporate and governmental leaders across a range of fields, he is also the founder of See to Solve, a business process software company. Spear once worked in finance, at a Congressional agency, and at the University of Tokyo. He has a doctorate from Harvard, masters degrees in mechanical engineering and management from MIT, and a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton. He and his wife, Miriam, an architect, live in Brookline MA, where they volunteer for several community organizations.
