Acknowledgments
Make a difference. Most humans are wired to want to do so. We’ve been thrilled to see how our first edition of Beyond Performance made a difference to many leaders and organizations who had the courage to take the red pill! Our hope is that this fully revised version makes an even bigger difference. Whether that happens or not is out of our hands. We are in control, however, of ensuring that those who have made a massive difference to us in helping shape the thinking that you hold in your hands are acknowledged and thanked. The lineage of McKinsey & Company’s thought leadership in the area of organizational excellence can be traced back to 1982, when Tom Peters and Robert Waterman wrote In Search of Excellence, one of the bestselling and most influential management books of all time. We owe them our thanks for the groundbreaking work on which we are building. Although we haven’t been so bold as to entitle our book Excellence Found, our goal has been to provide leaders with new tools and fresh insights that meaningfully build on their work. Credit for many of these tools and insights goes to a host of people who are passionate about helping leaders make successful change happen, who have taken time to share their facts, stories, and wisdom with us. It is our privilege to be able to pass on what we have learned from them. Among those we’d like to acknowledge by name are the 30 senior leaders from around the world who graciously spent significant time with us during our initial research:
All of their stories are full of human drama, high-stakes decision-making, battles won and lost, lessons learned, and wisdom gained. We’ve done our best to do justice to their extraordinary work. Our experiences with senior executives helped inform our view of what works and what doesn’t work. To understand why, however, we looked to academia. Why do leaders who follow their natural instincts to solve a problem themselves often unintentionally sabotage their ability to make change stick? How is it that hard-working, well-meaning, and capable people can find themselves working together in ways that prevent everyone from performing to their best ability? Why don’t changes to incentive plans create substantively different levels of motivation? It was in the process of exploring questions like these that we were greatly assisted by academic colleagues:
We didn’t stop at senior executives and academics, though. The reliability of our prescriptions—whether or not they yield the same results in different environments—has been directly tested by many change leaders: typically, people one or two levels below the senior leader who are responsible for activating change in their organization. As we mentioned in the introduction, for over 15 years, we have brought together groups of people around the world playing this role in a series of two-day peer-learning events known as the Change Leaders Forum. There is now a community of more than 3,000 alumni who have acted as a source of inspiration, a sounding board, and a test bed for the insights in this book. As they have often been the first to implement new ideas and approaches, they have had to endure the inevitable “Uh-oh” moments that happen whenever thinking is pushed beyond proven boundaries. They’ve done it so you don’t have to! We can’t thank them enough. We also want to thank our colleagues at McKinsey who’ve worked side-by-side with us to develop the thinking and prove the approaches herein. Starting with those who have spearheaded the design and delivery of the aforementioned Change Leaders Forums around the world, we thank Simon Blackburn, Arne Gast, and John Parsons. On the big idea of organizational health, we want to thank Aaron De Smet, Colin Price, Mark Loch, Chris Gagnon, Matt Guthridge, Richard Elder, Lili Duan, Brooke Weddle, Carla Arellano, and Lisa Seem for their pioneering work. Without these people and the others who support them, the Organizational Health Index and its database would never have existed, and neither would this book. Their contribution was not limited to the data whose breadth and depth provides us with such a distinctive research base; we also derived a huge benefit from their extraordinary ability to draw practical insights from this rich source. Next up, there’s Josep Isern, Mary Meaney (Scott’s co-author of Leading Organizations: Ten Timeless Truths), Giancarlo Ghislanzoni, and Felix Brück, who all played important roles in the evolution of our thinking on how organizations can make large-scale change happen successfully and sustainably. This group laid the foundation for how to think in an integrated way about the performance and health aspects of a change program. Then there’s Michael Rennie, Carolyn Dewar (Scott’s co-authors for The Performance Culture Imperative), Tom Saar, Gita Bellin, and Mike Carson, who have brought real innovation to the practice of influencing shifts in mindsets and behavior. In a context where managing the “hard stuff” is seen as table stakes, they have gone above and beyond the call of duty to bring insight, rigor, and discipline to managing the “soft stuff.” Further, we thank our colleague Lowell Bryan—the accomplished author of books such as Race for the World
, Market Unbound
, and Mobilizing Minds
—from whom we’ve taken the concept of strategy as a portfolio of initiatives. Finally, we thank Joanna Barsh and Susie Cranston (co-authors of How Remarkable Women Lead
), Johanne Lavoie (co-author with Joanna Barsh of Centered Leadership
), and Caroline Webb (author of How to Have a Good Day
) for their cutting-edge research into what it means to be a centered leader. Special thanks also go to colleagues who have led the charge in relation to the all-important on-the-ground research, project management, and expert advisory of this effort, as well as the first edition. Svetlana Andrianova, Alice Breeden, Natasha Bergeron, Seham Husain, Taylor Lauricella, and Rodgers Palmer toiled tirelessly to ensure that what you hold in your hands reflects our latest and best thinking. Throughout the writing process, we’ve worked closely with Louise Tucker, our editor, who has made this book eminently more readable and understandable than it otherwise would have been. We also thank Rik Kirkland, who made the publishing process as pain-free as possible and in so doing put his editorial stamp on the content. Similarly, we are grateful to Bill Falloon, executive editor at John Wiley & Sons, whose feedback and encouragement to create a revised edition has been invaluable. And when it comes to making a difference, we also owe a deep debt to our families for their patience, sacrifices, and support for us in the writing process, in our careers, and in our lives in general. When writing this book, we didn’t ask how many working days we had before the next deadline, but rather how many weekends. A heartfelt thank-you goes from Scott to his superhero wife, Fiona, and their three boys: Lachlan (also a published author!), Jackson (a special-needs teenager whose miraculous story will no doubt be published someday), and Camden (an avid reader when not pursuing his passion for water polo). Bill would like to thank his “life wife” and partner, Becky Keptner, for her unending commitment to him, their partnership, and their blended family—the Surrey Five. The kids—Will, Anna, and Vaughn—continue to be an ongoing source of laughter, motivation, and inspiration. Finally, we want to thank you, our readers, for your interest in this book. We are thrilled that the core of the thinking from our first edition has stood the test of time and proven helpful. At the same time, we are pleased to share some new truths, better methods, and improved explanations in this fully revised version. We continue to want to improve ourselves and the impact of this work and, in this spirit, we welcome any feedback you are willing to share. You can reach us at [email protected] and [email protected].