JUST PLANE CULTURE
By Patrick Kinane I 03 2015 18
f you run an organization, you want it to be considered a high-performance organization (HPO). If you are a member of an organization you also want to be work- ing for an HPO because we all want to be on a winning
team. “Good to Great” by Jim Collins and “In Search for Excel- lence” by Thomas Peters are two books written about HPOs without referring to them in that way. CEOs and managers have read these works and try to emulate their principles, but the results are inconsistent. There is substance to the meth- odology of these works, but they lack the robustness of the scientifi c principles of objectivity, reliability and validity. Some of the organizations highlighted in “Good to Great” are now faltering and there is no empirical evidence backing the fi nd- ings of “In Search for Excellence”. Programs and processes that steer us to becoming an HPO include the Baldrige criteria and its state counterparts, ISO standards, Lean Six-Sigma, and total quality management (TQM).
We tend to think of HPOs in the fi nancial sense. Businesses
that are fi nancially sound and profi table must be HPOs. The logic is reasonable but fl awed. The Forbes 100 is a popular compilation of the 100 top-performing companies. A comparison of the Forbes 100 in 1917 to the 1987 list shows that 61 have ceased to exist. Of the survivors, they collectively earned 20 percent less than the overall market with only two slightly exceeding the average. Expanding on that concept, the Standard & Poor‘s 500 from 1957 showed similar declines with only 74 of the 500 organizations remaining on the list 40 years later. So if fi nancial success is not the defi ning matter, what is? Can we safely say that those that survived are HPO material? Maybe, but those that remain on these lists are not stellar performers.
DOMmagazine
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68