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Recommended Resource – Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage

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Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage
by Scott Keller and Colin Price

About the Reference

In Beyond Performance, Scott Keller and Colin Price reveal that achieving organizational excellence is a combination of performance – the delivery of financial results – and health – the ability to perform year after year. Both are shown to be measurable and achieved through the five frames of:

  • Aspire: Where do we want to go?
  • Assess: How ready are we to go there?
  • Architect: What do we need to do to get there?
  • Act: How do we manage the journey?
  • Advance: How do we keep moving forward?

The findings presented in Beyond Performance are founded on extensive research and empirical data. This underlying evidence gives Beyond Performance a level of credibility few other business books have been able to achieve.

Benefits of Using this Reference

StrategyDriven Contributors like Beyond Performance because it provides a method for achieving organizational excellence that is founded on the real-world performance of top companies. Additionally, Beyond Performance provides insights to the role of organization leaders in fostering ongoing performance excellence.

The analysis behind the actionable performance enhancement method is presented in such a manner that it gives the reader a clear understanding of how excellence might be similarly fostered within his/her organization. Use of organizational characteristic models and definition tables further enhances this clarity. Enough detail is provided so that the reader can create performance metrics to measure for the existence of enabling organizational characteristics and performance improvement when the journey for excellence is undertaken.

Beyond Performance‘s method for achieving organizational excellence is well aligned with that recommended by StrategyDriven; making it a StrategyDriven recommended read.

StrategyDriven Evaluation and Control Program Best Practice Article

Evaluation and Control Program Best Practice 2 – Measure Against Excellence

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In this hyper-competitive business world there are no points for second place. Companies not achieving excellence in key performance areas as defined by their chosen market often find themselves driven to irrelevancy by competitors and in danger of going out of business. Subsequently, organization leaders must know how their company performs against standards of excellence in the key areas to be able to make the investment decisions necessary to remain competitive.[wcm_restrict plans=”41266, 25542, 25653″]

Measuring performance against standards of excellence provides a clearly defined, uniformly applied reference point and does not mean the company should seek to achieve excellence in all areas. Achieving performance excellence in the several critical competitive areas as defined by the organization’s industry and market positioning is necessary. For all other performance areas, a measurement against excellence provides executives and managers with a reference to what is achievable; enabling them to more fully understand the possibilities for improvement and more likely to assess the merit of these opportunities as a way to advance the business.

Defining Performance Excellence

Identifying quantitative measures of performance excellence can be a difficult process. The following principles and sources are recommended to ensure appropriate performance references are defined.

Principles

  • Identify the key areas for which performance references will be sought based on the company’s industry and market strategy
  • Seek performance references from companies within multiple industries; identifying the organization’s industry performance reference separately
  • Use multiple companies to determine the excellent performance standard; leveraging the performance citations of reputable evaluators to focus the assessment process
  • Avoid using averages; instead identifying truly excellent performance
  • Refresh each performance reference periodically; based on the area’s criticality to the business’s success

Sources

  • Trade associations and industry organizations (including their publications), such as the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Electric Power Research Institute
  • Functional area membership organizations and professional organizations (including their publications), such as the Project Management Institute and Society for Human Resource Management
  • Publically available data, such as company statements and government reports
  • Management consultants
  • Onsite benchmarking of other companies

Presenting the Performance Excellence Reference

Organizational performance in key areas should be broadly and routinely communicated. These communications will take several forms including performance metrics and reports, as well as self-assessment and benchmarking reports. And while the leadership’s established performance criteria should always be prominently displayed, reference to the standard of excellence should also be included.

Presenting organizational performance against the single marketplace standard of excellence provides only a partial picture of performance. As performance data is collected from multiple benchmark organizations, an attempt should be made to show performance in a quartile framework. The performance of the company’s various business units and direct competitors can also be plotted in this quartile framework to present a complete overview of the competitive landscape.[/wcm_restrict][wcm_nonmember plans=”41266, 25542, 25653″]

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