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This paper aims to address the nature of sustainable enterprise excellence, what it is, its enablers and specific manifestations.

A sweeping model of sustainable enterprise excellence, resilience and robustness is introduced, along with its enablers. Among enablers, supply-chain proficiency, vertical trust, distributed leadership and neuropsychological measurement are cited. A method of strategy modeling is introduced that, if rigorously pursued, will improve enterprise strategy and, hence, also opportunity for better subsequent performance and impacts. Similarly, an approach for strategic alignment in a large, multi-level enterprise is presented.

There are many paths toward sustainable enterprise excellence. Regardless of the path, this anticipates enterprise pursuit of socially equitable, environmentally responsible and economically sound performance and impacts.

The present is the Anthropocene age, an era fraught with challenges largely of people's own making and related to climate change and various sorts of social strain. Organizations have the wherewithal to attack these challenges. Given the orientation of sustainable enterprise excellence, methods and models that advance sustainable enterprise excellence have the potential to combat these challenges.

Sustainable enterprise excellence provides models and methods for confronting significant challenges that societies and organizations alike are faced with. Various models and paths to sustainable enterprise excellence are suggested in this paper.

A measurement system for business excellence is introduced. In what follows the development of this index is described and the first results obtained in Denmark in 1998, 1999 and 2000 are shown. Data and results from a similar study done in Sweden in year 2000 are also described. The presentation includes a discussion of the stability of the model across years for a given country and a discussion of the stability of the model across the two nations represented by Denmark and Sweden. Information about actual financial results for the companies is included and the paper discusses the possibility of using results from the Business Excellence Model as a proxy for actual financial results in Sweden and Denmark.

This paper examines the criterion weights of the EFQM excellence model. More and more research indicates that the official criterion weights from EFQM do not correspond with the way companies are working. This, of course, raises the question whether or not it makes any sense to compare companies according to an arbitrary weight structure, which has never been empirically tested? In this paper the criterion weights are estimated through the use of a factor scores regression based on confirmatory factor analysis of a number of bootstrapped samples. This estimation procedure is applied on data collected among Danish companies which responded to a self‐assessment questionnaire covering the EFQM excellence model in each of the years 1998‐2001. The overall conclusions are that the allocation of weights is fairly stable for most of the criteria except for one. The weight allocated to “People results” is significantly lower in 2001 than in 1999 and 1998.

This paper describes the need for intangible measurements for non‐financial reporting. Nowadays book value accounts for just around one quarter of the market value making the relevance of the balance sheet questionable. There is therefore a need for developing standardized methodologies for quantifying intangible assets and this is already underway. Two recently developed methodologies, The European Performance Satisfaction Index and The European Employee Index, is described in the paper and the benefit of applying these methodologies is exemplified through empirical data. These data stems from Amtsparekassen Fyn which is a medium sized Danish bank that has measured employee/customer satisfaction systematically since 1997 and the data used for this analysis is from the surveys conducted in 2000. The analysis shows that the measures for employee and customer satisfaction are good predictors of financial performance.

This paper aims to develop a strategy model which explains what organisations should focus on in their strategy work, both in terms of the environment and how the strategy is implemented. In addition, the purpose is to demonstrate how this can influence and improve the organisations’ performance.

The study uses different state-of-the-art strategy approaches to create and validate a solid and causal strategy model, which was validated by making use of a questionnaire.

The nature of strategy is complex, and organisations are indeed facing more complex tasks which require that internal resources are available to meet the environmental demands, develop an effective strategy for today and tomorrow, implement the strategy and execute the action plans. A model consisting of five areas divided up in strategy content (productivity, flexibility and innovation) and strategy process (execution and culture) has been validated, and the empirical results indicate that execution and innovation are the areas in which organizations face the greatest challenges.

Suggesting a new strategy model designed to evaluate companies’ strategy work.

The purpose of this paper is to inquire into the question: to what extent does the process of establishing radical innovation proposals identify new potential for improved performance? The goal is to determine the types of early stage concepts that are developed, their potential performance impact on the existing business and their potential value to the organization ex ante decision making with respect to choice of projects to pursue.

The authors apply a participatory case study approach combined with a content analysis of data from an idea management system that was utilized by the case organization. The authors build new empirically based theory on the direct and indirect value that emerges by creating new potential concepts to the innovation stream of an existing company.

The authors conclude that three types of performance-improving activities are developed to be exploited during opportunity recognition and concept development, through a disciplined approach to uncovering potential RI projects. These concern existing products and production, as well as the conceptualization of new products to the organization, market and world.

Approaching high uncertainty projects in a disciplined manner can be beneficial to an organization, since knowledge that is directly exploitable to improve performance is identified during the exploration process.

The paper is original since the authors treat the study of innovation as an independent variable. The authors apply a theory-building approach based on empirical evidence that was collected in a real life setting and not in a business school setup. The findings are novel because the authors examine the potential value of radical innovation processes ex ante realization and decision making. Hence, the authors examine what happens before the archetypical performance measurements of realized innovation projects can be utilized to verdict the success or failure.

For businesses a major drawback of self‐assessments based on quality award models is the amount of precious time and effort they require. Based on work with a major European service company, a ‘quick’ approach has been developed by Aarhus School of Business. In the second of two articles, Jens Dahlgaard and Jakob Eskildsen explain its new method for scoring business excellence and compare it with established approaches.

In 2003 Reichheld published an article in HBR, in which he claims that the net promoter score (NPS), is the only number you need to grow, and the only number you need to manage customer loyalty. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the NPS is inferior to the standard measures of loyalty used by the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and EPSI rating.

In 2006 a customer satisfaction survey of the entire insurance sector in Denmark was conducted. The survey design was based on the questionnaires from EPSI rating and ACSI supplemented with insurance-specific questions, consumer sentiment questions and the basic Net Promoter Question. The sample consists of approximately 2,000 observations.

The analyses presented in this paper show that the NPS it not what it claims to be: the one number you need to grow. The NPS is found to be a very poor predictor of both customer loyalty and customer satisfaction. The measure is very sensitive to changes in the underlying distribution, and finally the precision of the NPS was found to be low compared to other measures of loyalty, and it is not possible to predict the NPS categorization and hence it is hard to say precisely, how organizations can influence corporate growth based on the NPS.

The analysis is only conducted on data collected in a Danish business-to-consumer setting. More research is needed to shed light on the performance of the NPS across cultures as well as in a business-to-business setting.

The paper demonstrates the dangers of using the NPS as an input to managerial decision making. Organizations are far better off using a standard customer loyalty measure such as those employed by the ACSI or EPSI instead of the NPS.

Previous studies of the NPS have not replicated the methodology directly. Either there have been differences in scale length or in wording. The authors have constructed an experiment in the Danish insurance industry that answers some of the questions concerning the NPS without the shortcomings that most of the previous studies have suffered from.

This paper examines the weight structure of the EFQM excellence model. This is done through a survey among 756 chief executive officers from Danish companies who responded to a self‐assessment questionnaire. The data from this survey have been analysed through factor score regression based on confirmatory factor analysis on 5,000 bootstrapped samples. The analysis shows that the perceived criterion weights vary from the current allocation in the EFQM excellence model. This deviation is so substantial that the allocation of weights between the enabler and the result block vary considerably from the actual allocation in the EFQM excellence model. Furthermore, it seems as if Danish companies perceive the enabler criteria as equally important but this is not the case for the result criteria.