Accelerating Performance

CHAPTER 5What’s Your Current Pace? A Diagnostic

To be able to start the journey toward accelerating performance, you need to get a good understanding of the current status of your organization—what the metabolic rate of your organization is today. One good place to start, mirroring the analysis that we have done, is to look at your financial performance over the past three and seven years.

You will need two key ingredients to be able to do this analysis: your company’s financial data for the last seven years and your competitors’ (revenue and operating margin is all you need). If there is an industry index that measures revenue compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and operating margin, you can use that, as well.

First, calculate the revenue CAGR for your organization for the past three years, and compare it with that in the industry. Next, do the same for the past seven years. If your company is in the top quintile for both periods, and you meet our other “rules of 20”—no more than 20 percent of your revenue growth was due to acquisitions; your home government didn’t drive more than 20 percent of your revenues; and you didn’t lose more than 20 percent of your margin over the past seven years—then congratulations. You are a superaccelerator!

More than likely, though, you are not, because only a few achieve that status. Do not be disappointed by this. Many highly regarded companies simply aren’t accelerating as much as the elite ones are.

To see where you do fit, try to determine ...