Hello, and welcome to the Excellence University website!
Excellence University is a team of highly trained professionals focused on assisting organizations, teams, and individuals with getting more of their most important things done.
My name is Dr. Brian Higley, Founder and Director of Operations of The Building Blocks (featuring Excellence University). We appreciate your taking the time to visit our website; it is my sincere hope that you will find the information on this site helpful in your quest to achieve more of your professional and personal goals. I hope you'll enjoy having a look at our blog articles, research studies, helpful hints, and services – all of which are designed to powerfully enhance your success.
There is an important history behind of creation of Excellence University, so I thought I'd share a bit of it with you here. As a business leader, psychologist, educator, and individual I am so often amazed by what seems to me to be an epidemic of not "doing what we say we are going to do." From boardrooms (where strategic plans are outlined) to classrooms (where learning objectives are pursued) to living rooms (where New Year's Resolutions are developed), we seem to know – even as we use precious time and energy to develop our plans – that so many of them will be realized. For example, the business leaders that our team has interviewed over the decades have reported to us that they believe that between 5-30% of their strategic plans actually get executed on an annual basis – that means that they know that between 70 and 95% of what they plan for will never happen! When asked about what they think about this, they often reply with something like, "Well, that's just the way things go." This begged a few questions for our team, such as: "What do so few important things actually get done?" and "Why is this low level of accomplishment so acceptable to so many of us?" With great determination, our entire team set out to find real answers to these important questions.
After countless conversations with our colleagues, clients, and experts in the field (and after reading thousands of pages of the best research in the area of organizational and personal change), we believe we have come some very important answers; answers that can positively impact businesses, classrooms, and families in very meaningful and tangible ways. Excellence University was created to help to spread these answers via what we call "The Execution Excellence Movement."
What is The Execution Excellence Movement all about? It is about improving our ability to fulfill the following three commitments to ourselves and others (our business associates, clients, students, families, friends, etc.) – and to help others to do the same:
- Doing meaningful things – and avoiding spending time and energy on things that are not meaningful or as worthy of our time
- Doing these things on deadline – we all only have a certain amount of time in every day. Why not make it a habit to do what we want to do by the time we want to get it done?
- Getting these things done with a high level of quality and enjoyment – if these things are truly meaningful, why not do them to the best of our abilities and enjoy the process of pursuing and accomplishing our most meaningful goals?
As I'm sure you know, these three Execution Excellence Commitments are easy to talk about and agree with – but they are very difficult to consistently do! It takes a tremendous amount of focus and energy to continue to deliver on these three commitments. This is why we at The Building Blocks joined together with some of our colleagues in education and technology to form Excellence University: to work together to provide our clients with the solid, focused support they need to achieve "Execution Excellence" in their professional and personal lives throughout the entire year.
In closing, I'll say that it is impossible to be "perfect" when it comes to Execution Excellence; no organization, team, or individual achieves this state 100% of the time. However, we know that with the proper training and tools, leaders, managers, educators, parents, and individuals from all walks of life can do much, much better than the typical "5-30%." Our goal at Excellence University to is help teams and individuals to become 3-10 times as productive and satisfied as they normally are. Have we seen this actually happen? Time and time again, the answer has been a resounding yes!
Once again, welcome to Excellence University; we are honored that you decided to spend some of your precious time checking us out. Please feel free to contact us at any time with questions, comments, or suggestions for this site. Our goal is your excellence and satisfaction.
All the best,
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Brian P. Higley, PhD |
