High Performing Organizations

When James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras wrote their hugely popular 1994 book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, they began by stating clearly that they did not mean to write about visionary leaders, product concepts or market insights. Their goal was to find visionary companies -- the crown jewels of their industries -- and discover what made them extraordinary. The 18 visionary companies, the authors found, had a core ideology that helped sustain them in good times and bad. Then questions arose about the extent to which the principles of Built to Last might apply to individuals in addition to companies. That sparked another investigation that has now led to a follow-up book, Success Built to Last, which will be published by Wharton School Publishing later this year. lees verder

the characteristics of a high performance organisation

The foundations of nirvana
the characteristics of a high performance organisation
dr. André a. de waal mba

This paper, ‘The Foundations of Nirvana’, constitutes both the end and the beginning of the Nirvana research project. In 2003 and 2004 I published two research papers on the future of the performance management cycle. The aim of both papers was to describe how an organisation could achieve the status of ‘Nirvana’, the situation in which a company’s performance management cycle is both efficient and effective, where
everyone in the enterprise works to achieve the same goals, and where all employees are performance-driven.

Correcting a Culture That Breeds Mistakes

by Robert E. Mittelstaedt Jr.

When a corporation finds itself embroiled in a major crisis and spinning out of control, hindsight usually reveals a series of events leading up to the incident. Whatever the cause — a catastrophic environmental accident, a serious product design defect, a major strategic misreading of a market, or something else — major crises don’t just happen. Most are the result of multiple mistakes.

The Clear Leader

Marcus Buckingham spent two decades studying great business leaders. His conclusion: True leaders have a unique ability to make things simple.

Dip into most corporate or business-school curricula on leadership and you'll find a mind-numbing list of skills that the aspiring leader must master, from motivating to communicating to counseling to managing conflict, and on and on. Corporate America has vastly overcomplicated the role of a leader, says Marcus Buckingham, and that's a shame, because those disciplines, while important, fail to get to the heart of true leadership.

The 7 Types of Organizational DNA

by Gary Neilson, Bruce A. Pasternack, and Decio Mendes

An exclusive survey shows most companies possess traits that inhibit their ability to execute.

“Execution” has become the new watchword in boardrooms, as CEOs and directors watch sound strategies fail at the hands of organizations that cannot or will not effectively implement them. The first step in resolving these dysfunctions is to understand how the inherent traits of an organization influence — and perhaps even determine — each individual’s behavior, and how the collective behavior affects company performance.