Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by David Jacquemont for the McKinsey Quarterly, published by McKinsey & Company. He explains how and why applying lean principles to management, rather than just operations, can help large organizations reimagine how they work and unlock value through continuous improvement. To read the complete article, check out other resources, learn more about the firm, obtain subscription information, and register to receive email alerts, please click here.

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Executives at a financial institution wondered how to fight complacency as they watched competitors start to catch up to their most important product—one whose success the institution never quite matched.

A logistics company faced diminishing returns from years of cost cutting. Managing vendors now consumed many of the gains from outsourcing. Fixing talent and quality issues meant that “low cost” locations were no longer so low cost. And just keeping pace with the latest IT developments meant constant budgetary struggles. How could it get more out of the cost-cutting investments it had already made?

For an asset manager, the focus was on customer disappointment with how long it took to open and fund an account. Every day of delay meant lost revenue both for the company and, more important, for the customer. But regulatory constraints meant that speeding the process up seemed fraught with risk.

A government agency seemed to be in an enviable position, with demand higher than ever. But its budget was flat and it recently had to impose a hiring freeze. It needed to manage the influx while maintaining quality standards, without causing highly trained employees to burn out.

How often do you hear of these types of issues in your organization? How often do you confront them yourself?

Of course, questions that challenge how well large, modern organizations work are almost as old as management itself. But if it seems that questions are coming up more often, or more forcefully, there are good reasons.

The first is a rising sense of urgency, with large organizations recognizing that the pressures they face are unlikely to abate much in the short term, regardless of location or sector. In mature markets, slower growth, lingering debt burdens, and aging workforces are the chief concerns; in fast-growing countries, rapid expansion and urbanization are outpacing the ability of local infrastructure and talent pools to keep up. Everywhere, mismatches between worker skills and available jobs are growing, even as unemployment reaches new highs, especially among the young1 —while those managers and workers who do find employment report high stress and low engagement. To respond to these forces, organizations need new capacity and energy, but instead they find both are in short supply, having been absorbed by internal complexity.

Thus, while the specific issues may differ, the broader themes are the same. Large organizations realize they must reimagine how they work so that their scale once again becomes an asset rather than a liability. And they must do so from within, because external conditions—the rising economic tides that formerly lifted so many boats, regardless of how well or badly they rowed—are not likely to make a lasting return any time soon.

The second reason for questions is, if anything, even more important. Leaders know that some organizations are transforming themselves, finding new value while becoming more resilient, effective, and efficient in ways that keep reinforcing themselves over time. These organizations, both in heavy industry and in service sectors as diverse as banking, telecommunications, and government, attain a state that is as valuable as it is rare: continuous improvement. Their performance increases both in the immediate term and over the long run, as the techniques people learn form a new culture centered on finding ways to do things better.

However, leaders also know that imitating an admired organization’s best practices is hardly a reliable way to imitate its success. It takes more than a borrowed checklist. What is it that makes these exceptional organizations so exceptional—and keeps them that way?

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As the organization’s experience with the system deepens, its capabilities will naturally strengthen. At the same time, lean management fosters a culture that encourages continual reassessment. Gradually, that drive will come to apply to the system as well—the organization will seek to improve its application of lean management, to see how it could push the ideas (and its performance) further. Accordingly, the most committed organizations regularly conduct well-structured assessments of their maturity in lean management, giving them feedback on their progress in all four disciplines while identifying opportunities to reflect and improve.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

This article originally appeared in The Lean Management Enterprise.

David Jacquemont is a principal in McKinsey’s Paris office.