"When things go wrong, weak managers too often try to fix the blame rather than the problem. They point fingers and lay guilt rather than take responsibility, seek out root causes of problems and fix them."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Bridging the Credibility Gap"

"Many paths lead to higher performance. The high performance route is individual and unique for every person, team, and organization. There is no one or best way. What works for me, or anyone else, may not work for you. We can't follow someone else's path. We need to blaze our own trail."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Change Checkpoints and Improvement Milestones"

"Successful organizations are doing what was once considered impossible. They are increasing customer satisfaction, shortening process cycles and response times, reducing costs, and developing innovative new products and services -- all at the same time."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Getting it Together: Integrating Customer Focus, Involvement, and Horizontal Management"

"Grant me the patience to continuously improve some processes, the courage to radically reengineer others, and the wisdom to know when to do either."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Managing the Reengineering-Incremental Improvement Paradox"

"Improvement happens by pulling people together throughout your organization to analyze and improve key processes and support systems. What the indicators say are much less important than what's being done with the information."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Measurement Traps"

"Make sure that managers and improvement teams involved in process management are operating in a data rich environment. Process management depends heavily on data and analysis to gather reliable information about the scope of a process, how it's performing (measurement), and what customers/partners expect of it. This data should be highly visual (lots of diagrams, charts, and graphs) and broadly available so everyone can see the big picture."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part One)"

"Call it the Principle of Bumbling Bureaucracy — when left on their own, processes naturally turn inward to serve management and departmental needs rather than the organization's key customers and partners. Improve processes from the outside in."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part One)"

"Most managers underestimate how much time, attention, and support process improvement teams need. Unguided process improvement teams can be detrimental to your organization's performance. They busily set about improving things that don't matter, make changes that unknowingly make things worse somewhere else in the organization, or just squander precious organization time and resources."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part One)"

"Give lots of time and attention to the diagnosis stage of process management. There's a huge amount of learning to be done here. If a process has never been diagrammed or "blueprinted", no one really knows who and what's all involved. The bigger (and ironically more important) the process, the truer that is."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part One)"

"Draw a customer-partner chain to get very clear about just who the process should really be serving (customers and partners, not bureaucrats or management), and what the desired outcome is. Next determine the customers' most important measures of the process and how well it's performing. Use this performance gap data to establish breakthrough goals and/or continuous improvement targets."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part One)"

"Successful process management demands prioritization, organization, discipline, and a systematic approach. How's yours? You can't build a team or organization that's different than you are. Undisciplined and disorganized managers can't build disciplined and organized teams."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "Process Management Pathways and Pitfalls (Part Two)"

"Don't let specialists, consultants, or executives re-engineer the processes in isolation. Managers, supervisors and frontline improvement teams must be involved. They can move it beyond being just a project to a continuing management task."

- from Jim Clemmer's article, "The Newest Pet Rock Needs a Firm Foundation"