Accelerating Performance, in brief
The book by Colin Price and Sharon Toye, in ten minutes of reading: what the research found, the model at its centre and what an accelerated organisation looks like.
The question at the heart of it
“How fast can you get that done?”Without compromising rigour, quality and precision.
We rarely talk about culture. The term has come to mean long programmes with vague and unpredictable outcomes. Accelerating performance means speed, agility, competitiveness and, above all, performance.
What the research found
- Most organisations perform well below their capacity.
- You can’t have a dumb strategy, but a great strategy with poor execution is useless.
- Human systems tend towards entropy. Progress needs energy.
- From the top it is easy to see the boulders, but they sit on many pebbles. The value in the pebbles needs many people, not just leaders, to be engaged.
- Technology, from AI to robotics, will replace many repetitive jobs and put an even higher premium on imagination, initiative, creativity, purpose and ethics.
Mobilise, execute and transform, with agility
M + E + T + A = Acceleration
Only agility delivers acceleration. The ability to mobilise, execute and transform does not deliver acceleration without agility.
How entropy shows up
- Senior leaders do not adjust the daily priorities of the top 100 to reflect the strategy.
- Middle managers pad their budgets.
- Change is handed from leaders to specialist change teams.
- Great people leave.
- Senior leaders criticise each other and the strategy.
- Endless fights over revenue recognition, cost allocation and cross-charging.
- Hierarchies are too steep and spans too narrow.
- Budget processes take months.
- Too many projects, too few decisions.
- Leaders pull their punches and avoid difficult conversations.
- Leaders take on too much and become the bottleneck.
- The organisation is fragile and exhausted.
What an accelerated organisation looks like
- Purpose, mission and values are clear and understood by all.
- The vision is translated into every job: people know how they can and should contribute.
- There are forums where people help define how the vision will be implemented.
- Improvement initiatives are ambitious, focused from the top and driven from the bottom, and meet little resistance.
- Communication is fast and fluid, a by-product of involvement.
- People feel a sense of ownership of the company’s performance.
- Once a direction is chosen or a decision made, the organisation moves fast.
Small gains compound
1.00365 = 1.00Standing still, every day for a year.
1.01365 = 37.8One per cent better, every day for a year.
Acceleration comes from freeing resources for work that creates value: candour, engagement, creativity, innovation and inspiration. The resources are there, consumed by gossip, mistakes, rework and politics, or spent compensating for deficiencies.
Super-accelerators
A super-accelerator meets four tests:
- It is in the top 20% of its peers for organic growth over both the last three years and the last seven.
- No more than 20% of its growth is inorganic.
- No more than 20% of its revenue comes from its home government.
- Its profit margin fell by no more than 20% as it grew.
We have tracked super-accelerators among the world’s largest companies every year since 2017. Smaller high-growth companies show the same characteristics as their larger counterparts.
Read the book
Accelerating Performance: How Organizations Can Mobilize, Execute, and Transform with Agility, by Colin Price and Sharon Toye, published by Wiley.