Beyond Performance: How Great Organizations Build Ultimate Competitive Advantage

Acknowledgments

Make a difference. Most humans seem wired to want to do this in the world. Our hope is that this book will make a difference by enabling leaders to create and sustain truly excellent organizations–organizations where people's full potential is cultivated and unleashed. Although we don't yet know how much of a difference Beyond Performance will make, there are a number of people who have already made a difference by helping to shape the thinking and the development of the book you now hold in your hands.

The lineage of thinking on organizational excellence can be traced back to 1982, when McKinsey & Company's Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote In Search of Excellence, one of the best-selling and most influential management books of all time. We owe them our thanks for the ground-breaking work on which we are building. In many ways, Beyond Performance represents the accumulated wisdom of McKinsey, its clients, and its friends on the topic of organizational excellence over the intervening three decades. With that in mind, we would also like to acknowledge the contributions of all those–far too many to name here–who will see traces of their work somewhere in these pages.

Although we haven't been so bold as to entitle our book Excellence Found, we believe it does have a number of new truths and better methods to offer. Credit for many of these goes to a host of people who are passionate about helping individuals and institutions achieve their full potential, and who ...