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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 Welcomes Jeff Kortes

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The StrategyDriven family is proud to introduce Jeff Kortes as our newest contributing author!

Jeff Kortes is the President of Human Asset Management LLC, a human resources consulting firm which specializes in executive search, retention, engagement and front line leadership training. He is a ‘no nonsense,’ action oriented strategist that helps organizations acquire talent, engage and retain people as well as training the heart of their organizations… their front-line leadership using his Execution Focused Leadership® series.

In addition to running his executive search firm, he is a skilled facilitator, trainer, and professional speaker who energizes participants. Jeff has 25 years experience in human resources in both public and private sector organizations. He obtained this experience while functioning in construction, manufacturing, municipal government, and high tech environments.

Jeff is a regular blogger on retention, recruitment, and leadership and has also written and published the book No Nonsense Retention: Painless Strategies To Retain Your Best People. No Nonsense Retention is a hard hitting yet easy to read primer on how to develop and implement a strategic retention process in any department or organization. The book is based on real life experiences and research of organizations that successfully retain their talent.

Speaking Engagements

Jeff is a regular speaker to associations and companies about retention, recruitment, and leadership. His programs include:

  • No Nonsense Retention… Painless Strategies to Retain Your Best People
  • Slug Proof Your Team… No Nonsense Strategies to develop a High Performance Organization
  • Anyone Can Recruit… But can you sell the Organization?

To learn more about Jeff’s programs, visit his website www.SlugProofYourTeam.com

Follow Jeff on Twitter: twitter.com/nononsenseguy

Alternative Selection Best Practice 4 – Technically Right and Absolutely Wrong

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Executives and managers are rightfully concerned about the costs and potential returns associated with the investments before them. Subsequently, business planners painstakingly research, analyze, and calculate the financials associated with each initiative to be considered and present these and the associated risks to business leaders. To enable comparison, risks are also presented in monetary terms. The analysis is then aggregated in a cost-return matrix and a recommendation developed based on the organization’s available investment capital for those initiatives exceeding the business’s return on investment threshold. Technically, these recommendations appear very sound; realistically, they can be absolutely wrong for the organization.

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Additional Information

StrategyDriven provides many tools to aid you in the identification of your organization’s cultural drivers including:

The Happiness Advantage: Escaping the Cult of the Average

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Excerpt from The Happiness Advantage…

The graph below (see Figure 1) may seem boring, but it is the very reason I wake up excited every morning. (Clearly, I live a very exciting life.) It is also the basis of the research underlying this book. This is a scatter-plot diagram. Each dot represents an individual, and each axis represents some variable.

This particular diagram could be plotting anything: weight in relation to height, sleep in relation to energy, happiness in relation to success, and so on. If we got this data back as researchers, we would be thrilled because very clearly there is a trend going on here, and that means that we can get published, which in the academic world is all that really matters. The fact that there is one weird red dot – what we call an outlier – up above the curve is no problem. It’s no problem because we can just delete it. We can delete it because it’s clearly a measurement error – and we know that it’s an error because it’s screwing up our data.

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About the Author

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, spent over a decade at Harvard University where he won numerous distinguished teaching awards for his work. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. In 2006, he was Head Teaching Fellow for ‘Positive Psychology,’ the most popular course at Harvard at the time. In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think Inc. to share his research with a wider population. When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Shawn was immediately called in as an expert by the world’s largest banks to help restart forward progress. Subsequently, Shawn has spoken in 45 countries to a wide variety of audiences: bankers on Wall Street, students in Dubai, CEOs in Zimbabwe. Shawn’s research on happiness and human potential have received attention from the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR. To read Shawn Anchor’s full biography, click here.

Before You Try to Change Your Organization, Understand Why People Fight it So Fiercely

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Change is hard. Changing your organization is even harder – sometimes, nearly impossible. In doing the research for my new book, I discovered that a study at livescience.com revealed that nearly half of all smokers who have had surgery for early stage lung cancer go back to smoking in just a year!

So even the threat of death isn’t enough to force some people to change. And yet we all know that in today’s world of disruptive, 24/7 change, responding well is critical to our success. So as you struggle with your employees, associates, bosses, and others to try to shift your organization’s thinking – and before you jump out a window in frustration, it’s good to have a reminder of the reasons people work so hard to resist change. Figure out which of these applies to you, and how to overcome it, and you’ll be well on your way to seeing the birth of a transformed organization.

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About the Author

Phil Cooke is a television producer and media consultant at Cooke Pictures in Burbank, California. His new book is ‘Jolt! Get the Jump on a World That’s Constantly Changing.‘. Find out more at philcooke.com.