Focus, Focus, Focus
But in practice this is not as simple as it sounds. You are overwhelmed with advice, websites, books, advisors, conferences, good friends and colleagues about how you can best use your time to improve the organization. Slowly you are really starting not to see the forest for the trees. Where should you start? Doing nothing is not an option. After all, you are living in an age of extreme competition. An age in which organizations are having an increasingly difficult time due to the combined pressure of worldwide competition, rapid technological developments, better and better reachability all over the world, economic liberalization, more and bigger mergers and clients and citizens that are becoming increasingly demanding. In short, you must do something; you must prove yourself. Luckily, there is the up and coming advice area of the excellent organization. Since the resounding success of Jim Collins’ bestseller Good to Great more and more books are being published that are expanding upon Collins’ ideas. Books with wonderful titles such as Enduring Success. What top companies do differently (Bailom, Matzler and Tschemernjak), Meaning Inc. The blueprint for business success in the 21st century (Bains and Bains), Cracking the performance code. How firms succeed (Bevan, Cowling, Horner en Turner), Stretch! How great companies grow in good times and bad (Deans en Kroeger) and Hot spots. Why some companies buzz with energy and innovation – and others don’t, (Gratton). These are all interesting books that tell you how you can spur your organization on to perform better. But how do you know which of the proposed improvement methods is the best for you? To what should you devote your scarce time? Or would you do better to play it safe and simply apply all of them? That should ensure success, shouldn’t it?
But the haphazard application of various improvement methods is like shooting with hail: overall the chance that you will hit the target is very small. It is more accurate take aim at the target, with one specific bullet. In order to find this “magic bullet,” I spent five years researching the characteristics of excellent organizations, or high performance organizations (HPOs) all over the world. Due to the large amount of studied management literature and the large number of participants who took part in the study, the study has the broadest basis of all HPO studies that have been conducted to date. The research focus was on what successful organizations do right and what unsuccessful organizations do not do right and on what unsuccessful companies spend a lot of time on and excellent organizations spend insufficient or no time on. The result of the study is that the elements that make and keep organizations excellent for the long term were discovered in a scientifically supported manner. Based on the outcomes of the HPO study, a diagnostic test was developed that managers can use to guide the course of improvement. Thanks to this you no longer have to navigate based on intuition or belief and you can work on improvement with more certainty. You can implement target measures based on knowledge in order to let your organization grow in the direction of high performance. And… you now also know what is not important in order to excel so that you no longer have to devote time to this.
Comments are closed.
