Improving Performance: How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart, Third Edition

CHAPTER TWO

THREE LEVELS OF PERFORMANCE: ORGANIZATION, PROCESS, AND JOB/PERFORMER

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

—JOHN MUIR

Nineteenth-century environmentalist John Muir found that each component of the ecosystem is in some way connected to all other components. The brouhaha over the snail darter, which ultimately halted construction on the Clinch River breeder reactor, was not just about a tiny fish that affects very few of us; it was about tampering with a small tile in the environmental mosaic. Each tile that is removed or changed alters, if only in a minute way, the balance of the picture.

Similarly, we have found that everything in an organization’s internal and external ...