Strategic Planning Kit For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

A Plan Is Required to be a High Performer

High-performance organizations have fundamental differences that set them apart from other organizations. Anecdotally, these companies are better than their competitors at everything they do. They work more diligently and incessantly to improve faster than their competitors.

Tons of studies out there dig in to the hows and whys of companies that are ahead of the pack. But instead of getting lost in the details and differences of these studies, take a look at the basics, which I cover in the following sections.

At the end of the day, high-performance organizations accomplish extraordinary results, and they do it with ordinary people. If you keep waiting for extraordinary people to come along and make things happen, you're going to wait a long time. Instead, your goal should be to transform your organization in such a way that your people are capable of delivering high performance every minute and every hour of every day.

What makes great companies great

Becoming the best at something is often achieved by modeling the behaviors of winners and putting those behaviors into practice. Here are the characteristics of a high-performance company:

• Has a purpose that focuses the energy of all its members (typically, that purpose is to be the best there is or ever was)
• Simultaneously and continuously maximizes the self-interests of all its stakeholders ...