The culture of excellence. Challenges and opportunities during changing times

The main goal of the paper is to highlight the importance of supporting the promotion of the culture of excellence among people involved in a way or another in contemporary business. In order to support business excellence, the culture of excellence have to empower and engage all the people within an organization to think out of the box in a modern vision suitable to the challenging and changing times we are facing now. All over the world, in the most competitive countries, regions and sectors of activities there is a paradigmatic change of business strategies and policies oriented more and more towards performance and excellence. The paper highlights the importance of promoting the culture of excellence in the contemporary changing business environment. It suggests an important shift from a perspective that focuses on the so called ‘hero of excellence’ towards promoting the culture of excellence among the whole organization. Within modern business, in order to face challenges of the changing times and to explore their opportunities all the people from an organization are considered to manifest as ‘heroes of excellence’ by co-creating and co-working together within creative and innovative teams. They have to contribute and to participate actively to assure, preserve and develop the competitiveness and well being of the whole organization. The paper supports a holistic, cross disciplinary and integrated vision. It is structured into three parts including: a brief literature review based on an overview of the current state of the literature dedicated to the topic of culture of excellence (part 1); presentation of the main steps of the process of building a sustainable high performance organization (part 2); a brief presentation of examples of best practice and case studied identified internationally (part 3); conclusions that highlight the importance of culture of excellence in changing and challenging times.