Improvement Insights Blog

A recent issue of Harvard Business Review had an article about what makes a CEO a top performer. This trait is key to quality improvement and Six Sigma.

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“Hi, I’m Jay Arthur, author of “Lean Six Sigma Demystified” and QI Macros [software].

“I was reading the November / December 2025 issue of Harvard Business Review, and it talks about top performing CEOs. They have people in here like Jeff Bezos from Amazon, Toyota of course, and some other companies as well. But they found that top performing CEOs, unlike their cohorts, don’t focus on what the company does, they focus on how they do it, and they’re obsessed. They get down in the trenches to try and make things better, faster, cheaper, safer.

“And you know, it’s just fascinating that here’s an article which says these guys studied these folks [at] Amazon, Danaher, RELX, and Toyota. It turns out that these folks are really focused on building systems that allow the company to get better, faster, and cheaper all the time, and they’re really focused on customers; not on profits, but on customers. All right? And by that, they end up getting where they want to go, which is greater profits.

“They shift decisions closer to the front line and they’re very interested in making systems and continuous improvement. Continuous improvement, driven and modeled by the CEO… driven and modeled by the CEO… is the defining feature of the companies we studied. They try to be better, faster, and cheaper every year, forever… better, faster, cheaper forever, every year.

“So this is a great article about what separates great CEOs from okay CEOs. And the reprint article [number] is… what is it? It’s down here somewhere. There it is: R2505E.

“Now, one of the things I used to do when I was in the phone company, I read the IEEE transactions on software engineering and I would take an article that I thought was really good and I would cut it out and I would highlight key portions and I would send it off to the VP of IT and say, “Jerry, I think there’s some ideas in here you might enjoy,” and I highlighted some of the key things. And I would just shoot it off in the mail, internal mail. Now, I never ever heard back from him about that, but guess what? Our IT department would shift in the direction of what that article was suggesting. If you give leaders information, they will make intelligent decisions.

“I’m going to encourage you to go get this reprint and send it off. Highlight key things that you think are important. Send it off to your leadership team. Right? They have to take in information and decide for themselves. You cannot get them to do it.

“So that’s my Improvement Insight for this week. Grab some information from a trusted source and feed it to your leadership team and they will adjust.

“Let’s go out and improve something this week.”