CHAPTER 2 THE COST OF PERFORMANCE FAILURE
Performance improvement, whether in sport or business, is a massive global industry. According to the Association for Talent Development's 2013 State of the Industry report, US organisations spent $164.2 billion on employee learning and development in 2012.
Higher performance is clearly universally sought-after; there is an endless supply of ‘solutions' on offer, and yet the results of those various techniques never seem to shift performance much or for long. Countries such as Korea, Japan and France each spend more than €200 million annually on their national elite sport systems. Australia spends the equivalent of about €150 million. But there are always question marks as to how the money is spent and how much of a difference the developmental work actually makes.
* * *
If you go back 30-plus years the research, certainly in business, paints a dismal picture of performance improvement and successful change. Highly regarded intellectual and research powerhouses such as Harvard Business School, Boston Consulting Group, McKinsey & Company and the Gartner Group consistently point to low success rates in effectively dealing with major change, strategic implementation or new productivity initiatives. Some suggest that as little as 10 per cent of performance improvement initiatives actually improve performance at all.
The performance ‘solutions' currently on offer usually range from fluffy employee empowerment advice to full-scale operational ...
Get Fit now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
