In today’s dynamic business world, organizations must adapt, overcome, and improvise to meet quickly and efficiently the pressures and demands of a modern environment. As James Duderstadt summarized, We face a future in which permanence and stability become less important than flexibility and creativity, in which one of the few certainties will be the presence of continual change. Organizations must rely on the knowledge, skills, and experience of a wide range of people to solve multifaceted problems, make good decisions, and deliver effective solutions to achieve successfully their strategic vision. The current environment is one of shrinking revenues and increased costs and expenditures, a heightened need exists for value added efforts focused on increasing organizational performance and subsequently increasing business profits. The road to increased organization profits is built on an organizational foundation supporting, reinforcing, and even demanding improved performance. The question to answer is What does an organization have to do to have its name analogous with high performance? One can easily observe how organizational high performance is crucial just by watching the real life drama of organization and team performance in combat operations within Afghanistan or Iraq. Organizational performance, in those specific work environments, has a life or death consequence. Organizations, which fail to maximize their competitive advantage, may well find themselves in a non-competitive situation. Organizational performance is just as critical in any environment. An organization may die if they are performing poorly. Unfortunately, this fact seems to be unknown to some senior leaders. A high-performance workplace is an organizational state of mind whereas the people that comprise the organization are happy, fully of pep and energy, and working in a fun filled as well as an enthusiastic and optimistic environment. This type of workplace epitomizes an organization that works together toward a common objective via a particular strategy accepted by all. Everyone, executives, managers, supervisors, and workers, are driven toward a common end state. This book presents the fundamentals of organizational high performance, which are the concepts held within five overarching areas: 1) The Management System 2) The Business Model 3) The Leadership Standard 4) The Organizational Science 5) The Organizational Action Research Schemata Therefore, the battle cry is: High performance is the way to go! Let the journey begin! Unleash the Tiger!™
