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Everybody's Business: Engaging Your Total Enterprise to Boost Quality, Speed, Savings and Innovation by Marta Wilson

Wilson’s book, Everybody’s Business, is well written, concise and full of great advice that clearly springs from her experiences in helping companies identify their competitive edge. Wilson asserts that integrity is the cornerstone of success.Everybody’s Business is about how to make it everybody’s business to achieve organizational goals. Achieving this requires a "creating a culture where personal integrity can work in sync with enterprise integrity." Creating this culture involves creating leaders and innovators by drawing out every employee’s potential, one person at a time. She states that identifying special individuals who can move the company forward exponentially is critical for success. These individual contributors must understand the enterprise from a systems perspective. Wilson writes, "The more individuals understand the total system, the more they can contribute beyond the narrow confines of a specific job description."

To improve the total system, she advises leaders to draw upon the each person’s expertise in their portion of the system to improve the whole system. Unleashing the potential of individuals is dependent upon creating a concept of the enterprise as a working system and helping everyone understand it. After identifying these truths, Wilson lays out a path to achieve organizational goals through engaging individuals. She recommends assessing the organization and creating a plan that specially includes developing and utilizing human capital.

Throughout the book, Wilson includes "chat with an expert" sections that draw upon the knowledge of experts in the field on enterprise transformation. Topics include situational leadership, accessibility of leadership, and plans for human capital development. Engineering managers will benefit from the insightful advice of Wilson and the cadre of expert commentaries. Everybody's Business is a must read for leaders, entrepreneurs, and organizational consultants.