Times are tough. The economy is in a constant state of upheaval. Is your company doing better than most? Are you placing greater emphasis on pure performance?

If you haven't maybe it's time for a serious round of intense corporate soul searching. But do you know how?

Business consultant Chet Holmes says that beyond pure financial performance, most companies can really benefit from finding out what it really means to be a great company.

And the answer lies within.

Holmes is a man who is heavily engaged in corporate introspection with Fortune 500 companies.

He is widely credited with bringing a consultant's passion for rigorous self assessment and performance measurement with him.

Now, however, Holmes is obsessed with more than just the numbers. He's saying that companies must examine the company's culture and inner workings to find ways to be more than just profitable.

He's discovered that the breakthroughs can be achieved only if you figure out how to can tap into the incredible treasure trove of knowledge, harness the energies and then channel the efforts of your employees to help you become great.

Just think, you may have invested millions in automated systems.

Have you any real idea how they are being used?

Ask the employees.

Your people may know how to make money for you, but are the procedures and processes based on intuition, personal and professional experience, and corporate memory? Can these systems be readily duplicated or transferred in the event of accidents, sickness or major changes in personnel?

Ask the employees.

"It's possible to become the world's most efficient, relentless, and competitive machine," says Holmes. "But you have to find out what your company is really doing."

How do you do that?

Ask the employees.

Holmes is regularly brought in to lead companies through a discussion to find out what this really means. He has mastered the processes needed to identify the changes needed to make a company better. His skills are in demand.

Usually, he gets permission to hold a series of strategy sessions. He starts by asking employees to tell the boss how the company is doing.

How are we doing?

Is the top management strategy on track? What are we doing right? What hurts? What needs fixing?

Holmes helps the company identify specific items that reveal the things that standing in the way of becoming a much better company.

"Even one process improvement meeting can give you six months of things to fix in your company," Holmes says.

Case in point: Too Many Exceptions to the Rule?"

In one company session one of the items that came up was a vague notion:

"Too many exceptions to the rule."

Holmes asked people for specific instances or situations where this occurs. In an hours time he facilitated creation of a list of specific examples to document what people meant.

The list revealed 19 different situations where this company had never bothered to create procedures, policies or standards by which people operate.

Turned out that very few people really had any concrete idea how things were done across the company. The shock and pain was deep and felt company wide.

Holmes then asked the very same people how to fix it or make it better:

"What can we do to make the pain go away?"

They used a whiteboard to capture all the brainstormed ideas. Then they focused on culling the list of possible actions until they came up with two viable correction strategies for each problem. Using consensus, they went for the reasonable solutions that could reduce the most pain first.

The employees worked with management and implemented the corrective actions until all the 19 problems were fixed within two weeks.

Some of the solutions involved simple form letters. Some involved putting up a section on their website where many of these questions were answered (the Customer Service people would then send an email with the link).

Some solutions required setting boundaries by which the Customer Service people could operate, even creating a tiered approach to what they could do. (Meaning, try this, if that doesn't work, do this, if that doesn

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