Accelerating Performance

SECTION IVThe Four Key Skills

This final section gets into an area that is rarely covered in management books. Most will offer a prescription on what is to be done and perhaps lay out a plan of attack for reaching that goal. But, in our experience, businesses need to take one final step: They need to develop capabilities that allow the planned changes to really take hold and that will undergird a new way of approaching business. While these capabilities aren’t completely new, the four covered in this section do require a new way of looking at old issues.

In Chapter 14, on what we call ripple intelligence, we describe a more powerful way of making sense of what’s going on in the outside world. Historically, companies have taken a very mechanistic approach—the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to the hip bone, and so on. Companies look at a rise in the cost of supply and think about the effects, or they see a competitor’s action and think about that. But the world is too complex to think about events in isolation. In fact, your market is like a pond that people keep throwing rocks into. Each rock—some big, some small—splashes and creates ripples that interact as they spread through the pond. Your job as the manager is to understand how those ripples will play into each other and to spot the opportunities and the dangers. One surprise that comes out of our research is that it’s possible to train people and vastly improve their ability to make ...