Your business is made up of multiple people, departments, and processes, all working together to achieve the goals of the business. Understanding and optimizing these individual "components", however, is not enough to maximize overall performance. It is the "working together" that transforms a collection of components into a functioning system. "Systems Thinking" focuses on the interactions of the components, and provides you with the insight to stay on top of your business's performance, and the foresight to plan future directions with confidence.

Local optimization means making improvements to individual components in your business. You may think that improving all the components will logically result in overall improvements. However, many dollars spent on improvement projects are never returned to the bottom line.

This is because a network of interactions and dependencies exists within every system. Systems Thinking enables you to perceive that network - so you can navigate along its paths and avoid the entanglement of misaligned goals and conflicting reactions.

Global optimization is achieved by starting with your organizational end goals, then stepping backward through the network paths, aligning each component's goals with those of the components it precedes. Should local optimization and global optimization ultimately produce the same results? Absolutely not! For global optimization (the maximization of your bottom-line performance) only a few critical system components should be optimized in a "local" sense.

It is the identification of those "few critical system components" that puts you in control. These are the leverage points where your focused efforts will result in true, predictable outcomes in net system performance - a.k.a. The Bottom Line.