Accelerating Performance

SECTION IIIHow to Start

Now it’s time to start thinking about how to put into action all the data we’ve provided on how to accelerate your strategy, your organization, your teams, and your leaders.

Chapter 10 explains how to find the right recipe. It’s not possible to carry out all the differentiating actions we identified in the previous four chapters. It’s not even advisable to try, because you’ll wind up focusing on lots of issues that just don’t matter much for your organization. Instead, you need to pick your battles by choosing the right recipe of actions to take. We lay out four recipes that, in our experience, work best. One centers on understanding the customer intimately, one on attracting the best talent, one on becoming expert at managing a portfolio of businesses (for instance, by quickly moving capital to the best opportunities), and one on executing at a world-class level. We describe the six threshold actions necessary for any recipe to succeed, as well as the four anchor actions that are specific to each of the four recipes. We also provide a series of acid tests, so you can tell whether you’re succeeding. For instance, if you capture a 20 percent price premium, that indicates you’re intimate with your customers. You are a talent magnet if your unplanned (or regretted) turnover is half the norm in your industry and you need 30 percent less time than the norm to fill a position. And so on.

Chapter 11 describes how to get people to embrace all the changes that ...