IN THE ORIGINAL SUPERMAN SERIES, the Bizarro Superman world was a place where everything worked backward. In this world, nothing made sense: coming was going, wrong was right, sense was nonsense. Everything was topsy-turvy on this planet. Increasingly, the business world has seemed so to me. Wall Street’s insatiable appetite for short-term profits, environments of win-lose competition, strictly numbersbased management, fear-based work environments, applauded layoffs, forced ranking, so-called toxic employees, and on and on. The resulting attitude of every man for himself had seemed so hopelessly destructive. But as in the Bizarro Superman world, when everyone around you is behaving as if this is normal, as if this is what makes sense, it is easy to feel that it is you who is crazy; it is you who has it wrong. Occasionally I would stumble across the rare CEO whose manner and management approach cut across the grain of this bizarre world of work. These people fit a surprisingly consistent pattern: they were always ferocious quality champions; they were always humble, bona fide servant leaders; and they always seemed to be exemplars of wisdom, grace, and simplicity. It began to dawn on me that the performance of their organizations fit a consistent pattern too—an astonishingly simple pattern. It was these anomalies that pointed the way for me out of the Bizarro Superman world and into the world of superperformance. I have learned that just as there is a sweet spot on a baseball bat or a tennis racket, so there is a sweet spot of optimization. And I have learned that this is something any organization can access. This issue of the journal is dedicated to the study of that sweet spot, and it introduces a new theory for optimization: superperformance. Superperformance is not something that you do; it is something you get. It falls sway to simple rules, like all of nature. It is a discernable way of being that outperforming organizations have in common, and it is distinguishable. It is the fruit of a fundamental interaction. It is a secondorder steady state (that is, the system is stable at an outperforming level), and it is fragile—which explains why many of the companies profiled in Jim Collins’s Good to Great (2001) have now gone from great to good, or worse. There is no compulsory requirement that superperformers remain super. Without a fundamental understanding of what it is, how it is acquired, and how it is sustained, supercompanies can and will lose their shine, and the wind will go out of their sails. What is superperformance? Who has it? What are the simple rules for its emergence? How is it sustained? And what does its discovery portend for our practice? In the first article, “Superperformance: A New Theory for Optimization,” I address all of these questions and put forward eight simple rules that make up the backbone of this new theory. If you agree with its underlying principles, you will be led, as I have been, to the requirement for a new management science. You will see that the mechanistic model we reference is woefully past its expiration date. To make full use of this theory requires reframing organizations as organisms. This gives new explanatory power to the role of intangibles and the pattern of opposites that Sivasailam “Thiagi” Thiagarajan, ISPI’s grand old man, has so often pointed to in his previous writings (2005a, 2005b). (Why does it take us so long to internalize new knowledge?) Over several years at the offshore drilling company TODCO, Mike Kelley, the vice president of operations, lived the extensive transformation process to superperformance. He experienced a bona fide second-order change at TODCO, participating firsthand as the company went from a low-end, problem-prone, safety-challenged, cultural mess of a company to the best drilling company in the industry, achieving a fivefold increase in operating
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Jan 1, 2009
Karen S Whelan-Berry + 1
Open Access