Achieving excellence in an organization in today’s constantly changing business environment is a hard enough proposition. Sustaining that level of performance can be even tougher. Scott Keller and Colin Price of McKinsey & Company, in their book Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage, note that only a third of such organizations maintain their excellence long-term. Even fewer companies manage to implement successful change programs. Today’s leaders, Keller and Price insist, need big ideas and new tools to thrive and even survive.
The aim of Beyond Performance is to give organization leaders all the tools they need to build an organization that can execute short-term and maintain the vitality to prosper long-term. The authors’ big idea is that the health of an organization is as important as its performance.
Using exhaustive research, they debunk the common belief that copying the management best practices of other companies is helpful; more likely, it’s dangerous. From there, they explain how to determine the nexus of management practices that best fits your organization’s context. Then they provide a model for a staged change process — aspire, assess, architect, act and advance — along with practical tools to achieve superior levels of performance and health.
Keller and Price even note how the building of your organization’s health can turn into an intangible asset that can create the ultimate competitive advantage: Your competitors take that dangerous step of copying you, enabling you to adroitly adapt to and shape your environment ahead of them, so you are in the sunlight and they are constantly in your shadow.
In addition to reading the book (John Wiley & Sons, June 2011, 280 pages), one can read McKinsey’s summary of what the book presents, watch an interview with the authors — a 2-minute excerpt on the book’s Amazon page or a 9-minute excerpt of the same interview presented by McKinsey. McKinsey also provides video excerpts from a recent workshop presentation by Colin Price.
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