Part 1 of 2 Summaries
Book: Beyond Performance
Author: Scott Keller, Colin Price
Published: 2011
Pages: 241
Why Read
Closing with a quote from Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda, “Do or do not, there is no try,” this “manifesto” on how great organizations build ultimate competitive advantage is for action-oriented leaders who don’t just want to think or talk about what they would like to do. Though not an easy read, it is a very detailed accounting of how to set a master plan to build a healthy company that performs perfectly and changes quickly—with results today and relevancy tomorrow.
Part 1 of our summary provides background, touches on the research, and then introduces the “5As,” the five frames of performance and health that are the foundation of achieving organizational excellence.
Summary
Beyond Performance opens with Coke’s 2004 “Manifesto for Growth” detailing a growth plan that covered not just where the company wanted to be, but what it would do to get there and how its people would act as a team during the process of transformational change. It’s an example of the authors’ assertion that focusing on organizational health is equally as important as focusing on traditional performance drivers. (Organizational health is defined as the ability to align, execute, and renew itself faster than competitors—and this self-proclaimed “field guide for harnessing the full potential of your organization” offers a dynamic approach because ultimately people change, not the organization.)
The evidence? The authors cite a survey that organizational transformations that focus on performance alone are 1.5 times more likely to fail, but perhaps even more telling is the business banking example that yielded improvements of eight percent with a traditional approach to change while the performance and health approach results were more than double.
The 5As are introduced with corresponding questions that need answers in order to change:
Aspire-Where do we want to go?
Assess-How ready are we to go there?
Architect-What do we need to do to get there?
Act-How do we manage the journey?
Advance-How do we keep moving forward?
Then, the five translate into a challenge each for performance and health (totaling 10 challenges in all).
Focusing on the first step, nine elements of organizational health are offered under Aspire (direction, leadership, culture & climate, accountability, coordination & control, capabilities, and motivation)—each being further broken down into several practices. The main idea under the first step of Aspire is that organizations essentially need to choose six to 10 practices to be “elite” at. The authors give three questions to ask to help determine which to choose: Which will enable me to reach performance aspirations? What are our existing strengths? Which practices complement each other?
Leaders can leverage these three questions to see which of four “archetypes” to use as the foundation to build their organization’s health on (most companies do just fit into one): leadership-driven, execution edge, market focus, or knowledge core.
Next
With a good understanding of the first A, Aspire, in Part 2 of our summary, we’ll cover successfully moving through each of the remaining four stages, touch on a profile showing the process in action, and wrap up with some guiding principles.
