Destination—or Way of Life?

At some point during the many seminars in which I engage with executives around the world, I am frequently asked something like this:

"You talk about the making of a high-performance organization NOT as something to be achieved, but as a ‘way of life.’ What do you mean by this?”

This always strikes me as a great question, and one which targets the heart of the matter. There are many answers. Here are a few:

1. What sustains great performance is not effort, but habits. If high performance becomes a matter of habits of mind and action for everyone in the organization, it is sustainable. It becomes a central aspect of the culture.


2. You can arrive as a matter largely of good fortune. But fortune is fickle. It’s how you develop people on the journey that ultimately matters.


3. If you have your eye on “arriving” at Valhalla, you miss the most important part of it. And that is, in short, how competent you are to stay there once you get there. 


4. Great achievements are won in small, struggling steps. Those are not there arbitrarily. They are there to make sure you inculcate the habits required to go on to the next step – and beyond.


5. If you’re doing it for the rewards or the recognition, you are doing it for the wrong reason. If you HAVE to know whether you can make a high-performance organization or not, you are compelled to see it through. That’s the only way you will know.


6. And certainly not least, what you have to learn about making high-performance organizations you can learn only by doing it. It’s what you learn along the tough and demanding path of getting there that provides you with what you need in order to reside there.


7. There is a price to be paid. That is the price of changing habits, beginning with yours. If you haven’t got the right set of habits, you can’t stay there. That’s the ‘way of life’ part of it. You can’t will yourself there. It is your way of life (determined by your habits) that determines how your journey will end—or not.

Comments

[Mary Schmidt]

Lee,

Excellent post. Success never comes easy - it takes hard work and time. That's why I knash my teeth when I see so many of the books promising instant success, "The Secret" and so on. (One can "visualize" all one wants, but eventually you - um - actually gotta do something!)

The hard cold truth is that sometimes you can follow your passion - and the money won't come. That it takes more than a month (or even a year) for a start-up to become profitable. That, when you're an entrepreneur, you're going to have to do some crap work that you hate (like bookkeeping and such). That sometimes you just have to put your head down and keep slogging.

[Lee Thayer]

Mary--Thanks for stopping by. Why is it that people can't get the reality that you can have all of the passion imaginable for your enterprise, but that won't make it succeed? Your thoughts about entrepreneurship are spot on. I was thinking more of how to make a great organization out of a mediocre one. To me, way of life is just that - I chose it and everything about it, including all the ups and downs, I relish.

[Joe Bates]

One of the first things we worked on with Lee was our mission statement. We boiled the opening section down to "We will be the best in the business by every measure." Talk about a change in culture. You change every perspective from the old "How do we get by this year?" attitude
to "How do we get to be the best in the business?" The discussion points flow out as if a floodgate has opened. What is our business? How is our business measured? How can we compare ourselves, measure ourselves, improve ourselves? If the mission is taken seriously, no meeting in the organization is ever the same again.