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The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business Hardcover – Illustrated, March 13 2012
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Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.
- ISBN-100470941529
- ISBN-13978-0470941522
- Edition1st
- PublisherJossey-Bass
- Publication dateMarch 13 2012
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions23.11 x 15.24 x 2.54 cm
- Print length240 pages
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From the Publisher
Checklist for Organizational Health
Members of a leadership team can gain a general sense of their organization's health and, more important, identify specific opportunities for improvement by completing the following checklist.
Discipline 1: Build a Cohesive Leadership Team
- The leadership team is small enough (three to ten people) to be effective.
- Members of the team trust one another and can be genuinely vulnerable with each other.
- Team members regularly engage in productive, unfiltered conflict around important issues.
- The team leaves meetings with clear-cut, active, and specific agreements around decisions.
- Team members hold one another accountable to commitments and behaviors.
- Members of the leadership team are focused on team number one. They put the collective priorities and needs of the larger organization ahead of their own departments.
Discipline 2: Create Clarity
- Members of the leadership team know, agree on, and are passionate about the reason that the organization exists.
- The leadership team has clarified and embraced a small, specific set of behavioral values.
- Leaders are clear and aligned around a strategy that helps them define success and differentiate from competitors.
- The leadership team has a clear, current goal around which they rally. They feel a collective sense of ownership for that goal.
- Members of the leadership team understand one another's roles and responsibilities. They are comfortable asking questions about one another's work.
- The elements of the organization's clarity are concisely summarized and regularly referenced and reviewed by the leadership team.
Discipline 3: Overcommunicate Clarity
- The leadership team has clearly communicated the six aspects of clarity to all employees.
- Team members regularly remind the people in their departments about those aspects of clarity.
- The team leaves meetings with clear and specific agreements about what to communicate to their employees, and they cascade those messages quickly after meetings.
- Employees are able to accurately articulate the organization's reason for existence, values, strategic anchors, and goals.
Discipline 4: Reinforce Clarity
- The organization has a simple way to ensure that new hires are carefully selected based on the company's values.
- New people are brought into the organization by thoroughly teaching them about the six elements of clarity.
- Managers throughout the organization have a simple, consistent, and nonbureaucratic system for setting goals and reviewing progress with employees. That system is customized around the elements of clarity.
- Employees who don't fit the values are managed out of the organization. Poor performers who do fit the values are given the coaching and assistance they need to succeed.
- Compensation and reward systems are built around the values and goals of the organization.
Product description
Review
Review
Q&A with Patrick Lencioni, Author of The Advantage
Patrick Lencioni, Author Your other books have all been fables, but The Advantage isn't. Why?
Unlike my other books, The Advantage is not written as a fable because the nature of the subject it covers is just too broad to fit into one story. In the past, I've taken on slightly more contained and limited issues--teamwork, meetings, employee engagement--but this time I'm taking a much more holistic, comprehensive approach to improving organizations. Still, I've used stories about real organizations to bring the points to life, and I'm hoping that readers enjoy those stories and find them helpful in learning and applying the principles.
Do you consider your company healthy?
Yes, I consider my company healthy. And like any healthy company, we're messy and imperfect. We argue sometimes, we make mistakes, we try things that don't work. But we know who we are, what we believe in, and what we're trying to accomplish, so we're able to recover from setbacks quickly and grow stronger through conflict and adversity. I'm glad to say that we've always believed in living the principles that we espouse. And though we can sometimes forget and feel like the cobbler's children without shoes, we have certainly worked hard to become a healthy organization, and we continue to do so every day.
Having worked with companies for so many years, is there anything that still surprises you?
Yes, I still get surprised by what I see in companies I work with, even after all these years. Some of that surprise is just a function of the fact that no two people, and thus no two organizations, are exactly alike. The nuances are interesting and keep me on my toes. But ironically, the biggest surprise I get is being reminded again and again that even the most sophisticated companies struggle with the simplest things. I guess it's hard for me to believe that the concepts I write and speak about are so universal. I don't know that I'll ever come to terms with that completely.
How can someone who's not in the upper levels of their organization make an impact on its health?
While it's true that no one can influence and organization like the leader, and that without a leader's commitment and involvement, organizational health cannot become a reality, there are many things that employees deeper in an organization can do to make health more likely. First, they have to speak truth upward in the organization. Most leaders, even the struggling ones, want to get better. They're not leading and managing in the way they really want to, even if they don't come out and say so. When an employee is courageous and wise enough to come to them with respect, kindness and honesty, most leaders will be grateful. Without honest upward feedback, a leader cannot get better. Beyond that, people deeper in an organization can focus on making their own departments healthier, and not getting too distracted or discouraged by their inability to change things outside of their "circle of influence", as Stephen Covey says. By focusing on their own departments and their own areas of influence, they provide others in the organization with an example to follow, and they put themselves in a position to be promoted and to have even greater influence.
What's something I can do tomorrow morning to get started?
The first thing anyone can do, immediately, to begin the process of making their organizations healthier, is to begin with themselves and their team. A leader has to understand and embrace the concept of being vulnerable, which inspires trust on the leadership team. That trust is the foundation for teamwork, which is one of the cornerstones of organizational health. If a leader cannot be vulnerable, cannot admit his or her mistakes, shortcomings or weaknesses, others will not be vulnerable and organizational health becomes impossible.
From the Inside Flap
"The Advantage has more common sense in its 200 pages than I have ever found in a business book. A must-read."
—Colleen Barrett, president emeritus, Southwest Airlines Co.; coauthor, Lead with LUV
"Here is the next business classic. Even the best leaders will read this and wonder, 'Why aren't we already doing this?'"
—Enrique Salem, president and CEO, Symantec
"We are doing what most said could not be done in a down economy—start and exponentially grow a business. Using Lencioni's model for organizational health is an everyday choice and a way of life for our company."
—Liz Townsend, COO, My Fit Foods
"For more than a decade I've been using Lencioni's approach to run the departments I lead, and it has never failed me."
—Rick Friedel, vice president, AT&T Service Management
"Our teams and leaders have really embraced Lencioni's methodology. We've put these ideas into practice and we're experiencing the results that prove it works."
—David Gordon, COO, The Cheesecake Factory
"In The Advantage, Lencioni cuts through the corporate 'bull' that creates a culture of stonewalling and feet-dragging, and shows leaders at every level how to build up a culture of productivity and communication."
—Dave Ramsey, New York Times best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host
From the Back Cover
This is the promise of The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni's bold manifesto about the most unexploited opportunity in modern business. In his immensely readable and accessible style, Lencioni makes the case that there is no better way to achieve profound improvement in an organization than by attacking the root causes of dysfunction, politics, and confusion.
While too many leaders are still limiting their search for advantage to conventional and largely exhausted areas like marketing, strategy, and technology, Lencioni demonstrates that there is an untapped gold mine sitting right beneath them. Instead of trying to become smarter, he asserts that leaders and organizations need to shift their focus to becoming healthier, allowing them to tap into the more-than-sufficient intelligence and expertise they already have.
The author of numerous best-selling business fables including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting, Lencioni here draws upon his twenty years of writing, field research, and executive consulting to some of the world's leading organizations. He combines real-world stories and anecdotes with practical, actionable advice to create a work that is at once a great read and an invaluable, hands-on tool. The result is, without a doubt, Lencioni's most comprehensive, significant, and essential work to date.
About the Author
He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and four boys.
Product details
- Publisher : Jossey-Bass; 1st edition (March 13 2012)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 240 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0470941529
- ISBN-13 : 978-0470941522
- Item weight : 454 g
- Dimensions : 23.11 x 15.24 x 2.54 cm
- Best Sellers Rank: #6,886 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #20 in Organizational Learning
- #22 in Management Textbooks
- #30 in Organizational Behaviour (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Patrick Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, a firm dedicated to helping leaders improve their organizations’ health since 1997. His principles have been embraced by leaders around the world and adopted by organizations of virtually every kind including multinational corporations, entrepreneurial ventures, professional sports teams, the military, nonprofits, schools, and churches.
Lencioni is the author of ten business books with over three million copies sold worldwide. His work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Bloomberg Businessweek, and USA Today.
Prior to founding The Table Group, Lencioni served on the executive team at Sybase, Inc. He started his career at Bain & Company and later worked at Oracle Corporation.
Lencioni lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and their four sons.
To learn more about Patrick and The Table Group, please visit www.tablegroup.com.
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Reviewed in Spain on April 26, 2024
Je recommande à tous les DSI, CEO mais aussi à leur staff qui peuvent aussi les influencer.