Accelerating Performance

CHAPTER 18Conclusion It’s More than a Program

When we once worked in a mining organization, we made a point about the need for follow-through on a change initiative and offered a bit of evidence: Studies show that, when a doctor writes a prescription, only about a quarter of patients fill it and take the drugs as prescribed, all the way to the end of the regimen. An engineer bristled and said, “My cardiologist says he gets 65 percent compliance”—which made our point perfectly. A prescription from a cardiologist is more serious than just about any corporate effort, yet a third of patients still don’t comply.

Following through on the prescription for changes that will lead to acceleration will require a formal, disciplined approach, so in this final chapter we’ll describe the five steps needed to get from the starting line to success—exploration, aspiration, creation, implementation, and transition. We’ll go through each, explaining what needs to happen at each stage.

More important, though, we will describe the roles leaders need to play. We’ve split this description into two—what the business leaders need to do as business leaders and what change leaders need to do. In almost every successful transformation we have seen, there is some specialist expertise in change leadership. Often, the center of gravity is in HR, but it can just as easily be in risk or strategy. The split between the two roles of business leader and change leader is, in some senses, artificial, not only because ...