Business Excellence Interview with Brenton Harder, MD COO Division, Credit Suisse

To Credit Suisse, quality means getting it right the first time, a tagline its Business Excellence leaders are driving across the organization. In this Profit through Process podcast, Megan James, Summit Director for IQPC’s 5th Annual European Business Excellence Summit and Six Sigma IQ’s advisory board member, speaks with Brent Harder, MD COO Division, VP Operational Excellence for Credit Suisse. Harder share his thoughts on Business Excellence in today’s economy and how Credit Suisse is progressing with its own internal Operational Excellence program.

Harder, a headlining speaker at the Business Excellence Summit in October, provides an overview of Credit Suisse’s Business Excellence program. He details how for the past three to four years Credit Suisse has been building both awareness and support for quality across the entire organization. Moving away from centralizing quality, Harder points to Credit Suisse’s drive to push process improvement on everyone’s agenda and lists the four major shifts in its operational excellence program that are helping to achieve this initiative, which include shifting quality accountability to business units and focusing on the integration of quality with strategic innovation.

Harder shares key advice for process improvement professionals embarking on a Business Excellence program deployment, including his thoughts on talent management, and his belief that you should first implement Business Process Management, not Six Sigma, within your organization.