Beyond Performance: How great Organisations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage.

(Wiley, June 2011) Book Review By : Sudhanshu Shekhar

Competitive Advantage : a Journey to Achieve and Sustain:

As per the book survey of 600,000 employees in more than 500 organisations across the globet in their summary finds the 3 critical thingsto competitive advantage are: 1. Alignment 2. Execution 3. Renewal and the ability to undertake these three core elements faster than your competitors. The pace of global competition and influence over our lives become more significant as each day passes by. The ultimate competitive advantage is the ability for organisations to adapt to the present, whilst simultaneously shaping the future faster and better than the competition; not merely learning to adjust, but creating a capacity to learn and keep changing over time.

Specifically:
The 4 high performance dimensions for organisations to focus on: Executive Edge All leaders must relentlessly drive small improvements every day. Understanding Customers Focus on the market whilst listening/serving todays customers as well as tomorrows. Knowledge Core Leveraging, developing, and sharing knowledge better than anyone else. Leadership Development Building Leaders by involving them in the health transition programme. The 4 things Leaders must do to change the mindsets of those employees attached to the past and fearful of the future: Role modelling expected behaviours Walking the talk is essential for credibility and engagement. Story tellingRegular and consistent communications about what being healthy means. Incentives Formal structures and procedures. Talent and skills Building on a consistent and sustained basis, this means rethinking old ways of recruitment and development consistent with achieving the business strategy.

Book also suggest that benchmarking other organisations on this metric, whilst

helpful, is not as important as defining, creating, and sustaining your own recipe for excellence taking into account your history, environment, aspirations, and the passion and capability of your people which cannot be copied by competitors. The stats for organisations in the top quartile of health are: 2.2 x more likely than those in the lower quartile to have above median EBITDA margin, 2 x more likely to have above median growth in enterprise value to book value, 1.5 x more likely to have above median growth net income.

The five frame model health and performance are:

Aspirations: where do we want to go? what will be the vision and targets that are deeply meaningful to employees what does health look like. Assessment: how ready are we to go there? diagnose the organisations ability to get there uncover the mindsets that will support or undermine the road to health Architecture: what must we do? develop balanced KPIs invest in creating the environment healthy mindsets. Action:how do we manage the journey? execute the right scaling for each initiative control and sustain the energy required over time Advancement: how do we keep moving forward? implement long term sustained continuous improvement infrastructure. equip Leaders to lead The book talks about McKinsey 2010 survey of executives at companies undergoing transformations revealed that organisations focusing on both performance and health rated themselves nearly 2 x as successful as those focusing on health alone and nearly 3 x as successful as those focusing on performance alone.

Concluding thoughts:
Most organizations are managed for mediocrity. The facts are clear: only a third of organizations that achieve excellence are able to maintain it over decades; even fewer manage to implement successful transformation programs. These statistics have devastating implications. In business, most of todays companies will falter within 20 years. In government, the majority of reform programs will fail. And so will most efforts to create broader social change. This book by Scott Keller and Colin Price is written for those who intend to beat these odds. It is a mustread for any leader asking these types of questions:

How can we dramaticallyand quicklyimprove our organizations performance? What are the known pitfalls of transforming an organization, and how can we avoid them? How do we ensure that our performance improvements will last? How do we create a culture of continuous change that will help us sustain competitive advantage in a constantly changing world? In answering these questions, the book offers a full suite of practical tools, scores of real-life examples from organizations of all kinds around the world, and a clear process leaders can readily use to change

their organizations. All this is based on the most comprehensive research program ever undertaken in the field of organizational effectiveness and change management. The authors effort lasted more than a decade and drew on input from more than 600,000 executives and employees from over 500 organizations across the globe, some 900 academic books and articles, and hands-on practical work with more than 100 client organizations. New answers to persistent questions The authors have developed a number of fact-based, counterintuitive insights about what matters for success, such as: To sustain high performance, dont make performance your primary focus. An organizations healthits ability to align, execute, and renew itselfis equally important and equally manageable. The soft stuff can (and should) be managed as rigorously as the hard stuff. Tools to measure and manage health arent taught in business school, but they exist, are proven, and can be applied by any leader who wants to succeed in making change happen. Copying best practices can be more dangerous than helpful. With a rigorous understanding of health, its possible to analyze how management practices complementor impedeone another. Its clear that best practices dont work in a vacuum, and thats why replicating them in other organizations consistently fails to deliver best performance. Common sense will often lead you astray. Rational, logic-driven approaches to creating organization-wide change neglect the irrational biases that we all share. The most effective leaders take into account the predictable irrationality of employees and leverage it fully to create lasting change. Beyond Performance has been described by management expert Gary Hamel as a manifesto for a new way of thinking about organizations, and Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters, sees it as, a powerful training plan for the institution that seeks to win today and tomorrow. Shikha Sharma, the managing director and CEO of Axis Bank, adds, If youve ever wondered why some good organizations go bad, read this book. Keller and Price succinctly explain the reasons and show how to stop it from happening to you.