Authors.
Recognised contributors to Enterprise Excellence
Chris Butterworth, Stephen Dargan, Brad Jeavons, and Indi Ray are recognised contributors to enterprise excellence and leadership practice.
Their work spans practical leadership behaviours and enterprise systems thinking — forming a coherent body of work for leaders seeking sustained organisational performance in complex environments.
Together, they have shaped an integrated framework that explores how leadership behaviour and enterprise systems reinforce one another to create clarity, alignment, and disciplined execution.
A Connected Contribution
Their collective authorship includes:
Leading Excellence
Defining current best practice in practical leadership behaviours through the 5 Hats of the Adaptive Leader — recognised by the Shingo Institute and translated into five languages.
Leading Enterprise Excellence
Extending leadership practice into enterprise systems thinking — examining how strategy, culture, governance, and execution must operate as an integrated enterprise system.
These works are intentionally connected.
Leadership behaviours influence enterprise systems.
Enterprise systems reinforce leadership behaviours.
Together, they provide a structured and disciplined pathway to sustained enterprise excellence.
Connect with the Authors
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Brad Jeavons
Brad Jeavons is a recognised contributor to enterprise excellence, leadership practice, and systems thinking.
His work focuses on aligning leadership behaviours and enterprise systems to enable sustained productivity and disciplined execution at enterprise scale. He partners with leaders across industries to clarify direction, embed aligned behaviours, and design execution systems that operate coherently and sustainably.
Brad is co-author of Leading Excellence and Leading Enterprise Excellence, contributing to an integrated body of work that connects practical leadership with enterprise system design.
He is also the author of Agile Sales, extending agile and enterprise principles into sales environments.
Brad is:
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Host of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast and Community
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An Award Winning Author
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A Shingo Academy Hall of Fame member
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A certified trainer in Lean Six Sigma and the Agile Education Program
His work bridges leadership discipline, systems thinking, and practical enterprise application.
📞 +61 402 448 445
✉️ bjeavons@iqi.com.au
🌐 Enterprise Excellence Group
https://www.enterpriseexcellencegroup.com.au
Chris Butterworth
Chris Butterworth is an internationally recognised contributor to enterprise excellence, leadership practice, and continuous improvement.
His work focuses on aligning leadership behaviours, enterprise systems, and disciplined improvement practices to enable sustained organisational performance. Chris coaches executive teams and supports organisations in embedding structured continuous improvement capability across all levels — from senior leadership to frontline teams.
Chris is co-author of Leading Excellence and Leading Enterprise Excellence, contributing to a connected body of work that integrates practical leadership behaviour with enterprise systems thinking.
He is:
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A multi-award winning author and international speaker
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A certified Shingo Institute Master-Level Trainer
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A Shingo Institute Faculty Fellow, Examiner, and Member
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A recipient of three Shingo Publication Awards for books he has co-authored
Chris’s work bridges leadership discipline, systems coherence, and continuous improvement — supporting organisations to move beyond isolated initiatives toward sustained, enterprise-wide excellence.
📞 +61 (0) 4477 83 877
📞 +44 (0) 7968 833 7635
✉️ chris@cbenterpriseexcellence.com
🌐 CB Enterprise Excellence
https://www.cbenterpriseexcellence.com/
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Stephen Dargan
Stephen Dargan is an accomplished executive leader and contributor to enterprise excellence, with over 28 years of experience across the mining and financial services sectors in Australia and Ireland.
His work focuses on aligning leadership behaviours, enterprise systems, and disciplined execution to enable sustained organisational performance. Stephen has built, developed, and led high-performing teams across financial services and retail industries, and most recently served as a Senior Leader Coach at BHP — supporting senior leaders to strengthen clarity, accountability, and enterprise alignment.
Stephen is co-author of Leading Excellence and Leading Enterprise Excellence, contributing to an integrated body of work that connects adaptive leadership behaviour with enterprise systems thinking.
He is:
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A Lean Six Sigma Black Belt
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An Award Winning Author
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A Shingo Academy Hall of Fame member
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A Shingo Institute Alumni
Stephen’s experience bridges executive leadership, operational discipline, and systems thinking — supporting organisations to embed excellence into everyday practice.
📞 +61 459 811 148
✉️ Stephen@Mprove.com.au
The Story Behind the Books
The work behind Leading Excellence and Leading Enterprise Excellence did not begin as a publishing project.
It emerged from years of practical engagement with organisations seeking to sustain performance beyond short-term improvement initiatives.
In 2013, Stephen Dargan and Chris Butterworth began working together as Stephen led a productivity function within an Australian financial services organisation. As the organisation pursued an enterprise excellence maturity pathway, their collaboration focused on a recurring challenge: why do some organisations sustain performance, while others regress after initial gains?
At the same time, Brad Jeavons was leading an enterprise excellence journey in Brisbane, Australia. After studying multiple organisations that had undertaken transformation efforts, he observed that only a small number were able to sustain results over time. Chris had supported both of those organisations.
Through mentorship and shared reflection, a common insight emerged:
Leadership behaviour and enterprise systems cannot be treated separately.
Leadership behaviours shape clarity, accountability, and culture.
Enterprise systems reinforce — or undermine — those behaviours at scale.
When Chris introduced Brad and Stephen, their conversations quickly converged around this theme. What began as professional collaboration developed into a shared intellectual pursuit: defining a structured pathway to sustained enterprise performance.
This progression led first to Leading Excellence, articulating the 5 Hats of the Adaptive Leader as a practical behavioural framework.
It later evolved into Leading Enterprise Excellence, extending that behavioural foundation into enterprise systems thinking — examining how strategy, governance, culture, and execution must operate coherently at scale.
Together, these works represent a connected contribution to enterprise excellence — integrating adaptive leadership discipline with enterprise architecture.
They are not separate ideas.
They are complementary expressions of a single, integrated framework.
