• Why are the New Zealand All Blacks the best rugby team in the world?
• How does the Kirov Ballet produce generation after generation of exceptional ballerinas?
• How did Southwest Airlines evolve from being an idiosyncratic Texan airline to become one of the most successful businesses internationally?
• How does the Finnish School Education System deliver great results by breaking conventions?
‘Powerhouse: Insider Accounts into the World's Top High-performance Organizations’, uncovers the performance secrets of some of the most impressive organizations around the world and reveals the key principles they have in common to enable any business to raise their own bar.
To understand what makes these organizations great, MacNeice and Bowen have conducted immersive and personal research;
• investigating their culture,
• interviewing their leaders and observing their everyday practice.
Despite this diverse range of seemingly contrasting industries - business, sport, technology, finance, the arts - each of these successful institutions share a common bond: they are world-class industry leaders and have repeatedly outperformed their competition.
"At the heart of every institution whose advantage has endured lies an organizational model that works more effectively than its competitors," say authors Brian MacNeice and James Bowen in their recently released book, ‘Powerhouse’. The authors have sought to highlight those lessons that leaders of other organizations can learn from these institutions to put into practice themselves.
Having completed their research of the individual institutions, and looking across the portfolio of their case studies, they can draw two conclusions from their work, that relate to the delivery of sustained high performance more broadly:
1. The first is that enduring high performance reflects a competitive advantage that is fundamentally organizational in nature.
2. The second conclusion is that there are generic lessons to be learned from studying high performance across multiple disciplines that have application in specific individual situations.
‘Powehouse’ provides a four-pillar approach to developing high performance:
1. Plan: Establishing and maintaining a vision/mission for the organization
2. Priorities: Establishing short-term, organization-wide focus and milestones for achieving progress
3. People: Defining a behavioural code for the organization
4. Process: Designing the organizational structures and processes to achieve the vision/mission statement.
Reference: Brian MacNeice: ‘Powerhouse: Insider Accounts into the World's Top High-performance Organizations’
