Beyond Performance: An Interview With Colin Price
When I read Beyond Performance, the book that Colin Price co-acuthored, the statement that stuck in my min most was this: “When it comes to achieving sustained excellence in performance, what separates winners from losers, paradoxically, is the very focus on performance". The argument that went with it was this, "Performance-focused leaders invest heavily in those things that enable targets to be met quarter-by-quarter, year-by-year, but they tend to neglect investment in company health; investments in the organisation that need to be made today in order to survive and thrive tomorrow”.
For several years now I have been engaged in the study of Strategic Management, first as Executive Officer of the Strategic Planning Society, then, and now, as Founder and CEO of the Strategic Management Forum. During these years I have read hundreds of books and articles. I have also met with hundreds of practitioners, professors and writers on Strategy and Management issues. Usually a new book will offer a few new insights, but it is rare to come across one that I would regard as ground-breaking. By that I do not just mean that it contains many insights, although that is also usually the case. I mean it offers radical and compelling ideas that challenge existing paradigms. Such books are usually based on thorough research over many years, giving them the advantage of also being credible.
In 2014 I read Beyond Performance by Scott Keller and Colin Price, both Directors of McKinsey & Company at that time. In the foreword, Gary Hamel, author of The Future of Management, described it as “a manifesto for a new way of thinking about organisations”. It is certainly that. And it aims to provide organisations with an answer to the question: why is excellence so hard to achieve and sustain? It provides practical advice that will help companies beat the odds and achieve greater competitive advantage.
Having read the book I wanted to interview the authors, and I discovered that Colin Price is based in London. I made contact and was intrigued to learn that since publication in 2011, the research project the book is based on continued and it makes for even more compelling evidence in support of arguments already made.
Colin agreed to be interviewed, and this week I published the interview.
The thinking focuses on the need to ensure balance bewteen performance and health and includes observations such as: "The trap is to think that health matters only for the long-term. A better way of thinking about it is to understand that health today drives performance tomorrow”.
Giving an example Colin said, "If you are a bank and your time perspective is that you need to improve performance immediately, you would put no emphasis on the health of the organisation at all. You would go out and get everyone in the bank to bring forward all of their client pitches to tomorrow. You’d discount. You’d fire everybody that you could. You’d entirely focus on the finance. If I then gave you a different challenge and said right, you’re running one of the top ten banks in the world and your only objective is to be the best bank in 20 years, you wouldn’t think about any of those things at all. You’d completely reverse it and you’d say it’s about the brand, it’s about the quality of the talent that we’ve got, it’s about the integrity of the relationships with customers, and it’s absolutely about being trusted by the regulator and by society. So, very short-term focus on performance, somewhat longer-term focus on health".
In the interview we cover many hot topics including: the reason for short-termism; whether investors care about health and understand the value of it; whether better reporting would improve their understanding; why investors do not always hold companies to account; the impact of performance at the expense of health on risk; the fact that rhetroric about people being the most valuable asset does not reflect actions and engagement is so low; the need for a shift in mind set from provit maximisation to value maximisation; and the problem of the, "deluded devotion to the religion of shareholder value".
Get the full interview. Send an email request for a free copy
The Chief Strategist Club will host An Evening with Colin Price will take place on September 14th
