High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage [Kindle Edition]

Michael Beer (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Beer, author of High Commitment, High Performance, a book on business ethics recently published by Josey-Bass, posited three core reasons why Wall Street failed so badly in the fall of 2008: The firms lacked a higher purpose, lacked a clear strategy, and mismanaged their risk." (Business Week, August 17, 2009)

Product Description

"In these economic times this book is more important than ever. A must-read for the leaders of today and tomorrow."

Douglas R. Conant, president and chief executive officer, Campbell Soup Company

Praise for High Commitment, High Performance

"It is seldom that I read a book about leadership and get excited; this one did that to me. The author has found values and aspects of leadership that have worked well for long term execution of strategies. For Boards and CEOs, this is a great book."
—Leif Johansson, president and chief executive officer, Volvo Group

"Resilience promises to be the distinguishing characteristic of companies that will prosper from the current economic crisis. Mike Beer's new book is a compelling manual for success in this new economy."
—Ravi Venkatesan, chairman, Microsoft India

"A must read for leaders who want to develop an edge by building a resilient organization for competitive advantage. Beer's views and recommendations are based on extensive research."
—Ram Charan, Ram Charan Associates and co-author of the bestselling book, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

"With decades of teaching and research and close engagement with companies, Michael Beer has written a book that not only makes the case for building a high commitment organization, but also provides practical advice for doing it."
—Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor, Stanford Business School and author, The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First

"Beer brings a multi-disciplinary perspective from his extensive experience in industry and academia to reveal how leaders of HCHP organizations break through internal barriers and manage multiple tensions in their quest for sustainable value-creation."
—Robert Kaplan, professor, Harvard Business School and co-author, The Execution Premium and The Balanced Score Card

"Mike Beer brings his wealth of research and experience to provide fresh insights to the enduring question of what makes companies succeed over the long run. I have utilized many of the principles successfully and recommend them to any corporate leader committed to building an outstanding organization."
—Ed Ludwig, chairman and chief executive officer, Becton Dickinson

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Product Details

• Format: Kindle Edition
• File Size: 1708 KB
• Print Length: 416 pages
• Publisher: Jossey-Bass; 1 edition (July 17, 2009)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
• Language: English
• ASIN: B002JMV6SM
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• Lending: Enabled
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #146,995 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)

More About the Author

With 40 years of experience helping senior executives transform their companies into high performing, people-centric businesses, Michael Beer is a true leadership guru. Today, some of the world's most innovative companies and their leaders turn to Beer and his colleagues to address the increasingly complex challenges they face and drive long term business performance. Under Beer's guidance, executives are able to develop and implement strategies and initiatives that transform their organizations through a proven set of simple leadership and organizational processes.

Beer is the Cahners-Rabb Professor Emeritus of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; co-author of the 2008 Harvard Business Review article, "The Uncompromising Leader;" author or co-author of eleven books; and the chairman of TruePoint, a management consulting firm he co-founded. In his latest book, "Higher Ambition: How Great Leaders Create Economic and Social Value," (2011) Beer and his co-authors take readers into the corner office of companies like Campbell's Soup, Cummins, IKEA, Infosys, Standard Chartered Bank, the Tata Group and Volvo. With powerful stories and timely advice "Higher Ambition" reveals how today's most successful business leaders are harnessing the energy and potential within their organizations to deliver economic and social value. In his previous book, "High Commitment, High Performance" (2009), Beer provided a roadmap to much needed change in how senior management leads and organizes the enterprise and its people.

A prized management expert, he has received several professional awards including the Academy of Management's Scholar-Practitioner Award. He is a fellow of the Academy of Management, the National Academy of Human Resources and the Society of Industrial/Organizational Psychology. An accomplished speaker and professor, Beer taught in Harvard Business School's Advanced Management program, and has spoken and taught at numerous corporate management meetings, programs and professional meetings.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to establish and then sustain high commitment and high performance, August 28, 2009

By 

Robert Morris (Dallas, Texas) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage (Hardcover)

Now more than ever before, individuals as well as organizations must be resilient so that they can adapt effectively to changes, especially to those that occur unexpectedly. Achieving a competitive advantage is nowhere near as difficult as sustaining one. Therein is a paradox that serves as the title of Marshall Goldsmith's book: what got you here won't get you there. Even more ominous, what got you here won't keep you here. Hence the appropriateness of the subtitle selected for Beer's book. What he shares is an abundance of observations, questions, issues, suggestions, and recommendations that are anchored in more than 40 years of real-world experience. In the Introduction, he refers to his quest to study and build high commitment, high performance (HCHP) organizations. What he provides is what he has learned about what works, what doesn't, and the reasons why.

Written in collaboration with Russell Eisenstat and Nathaniel Foote, this volume provides a number of different perspectives and knowledge concerning several key disciplines that include strategic management, organization design, human resource management, culture and organization development, enterprise learning, and change initiatives. "Employing these diverse perspectives, I propose three paradoxical organizational outcomes needed to achieve sustained high performance [i.e. performance alignment, psychological alignment, and the capacity for learning and change], articulate five management levers for designing an organization to achieve these outcomes [i.e. leadership at all levels and in all areas, an effective learning and governance system, a strategic performance management system, an organizing system, and an HR system], and present a framework for change and its transformation."

Here's a key point: Obviously, there must be both high commitment at the senior executive level. Much more importantly, C-level executives and other supervisors must demonstrate - not only affirm -- high performance. Otherwise, they cannot expect those for whom they are responsible to do so and their organization will not survive in its competitive marketplace, much less dominate it. Moreover, as Beer explains in the Epilogue, "CEOs and their top teams will have to engage their hands to design very different management practices, particularly with regard to the firm's performance management and compensation systems. The former must enable hard-hitting, fact-based reviews of the business to achieve essential shirt-term profits in a way that does not compromise the firm's larger purpose and its long-term performance. With regard to the latter, surely a shift away from incentives for annual profits to incentives tied to long-term performance (five to seven years) is in order."

As Beer duly acknowledges, it is by means easy for CEOs, their senior teams, and boards of directors to build a HCHP organization. Once having done so, it is even more difficult to ensure that it continues to be one. Nonetheless, it can be done and - in my opinion - MUST be done. Here in a single source, Beer provides about as much information and advice as any business leader or team must have to achieve these separate but related objectives. There is much to learn from the core policies and best practices of HCHP companies. Also, CEOs and their top teams must "engage their hearts as well as their minds to redefine their to redefine their and their firm's purpose [and] define a distinctive strategy that leverages the firm's human assets and unique capabilities." Of course, this will require extraordinary leadership at all levels and in all areas of a firm's operations. To those who read Michael Beer's brilliant book, I now presume to ask, "If not now, when? And If not you, who?"

Those who share my high regard for this volume are urged to check out Jeanne W. Ross, Peter Weill, and David Robertson's Enterprise Architecture as Strategy: Creating a Foundation for Business Execution. Dean R. Spitzer's Transforming Performance Measurement: Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success, and Guy Kawasaki's Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition.

5.0 out of 5 stars outstanding, September 17, 2010

By 

bookworm - See all my reviews

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This review is from: High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage (Hardcover)

Based on extensive research and years of hands-on experience in the field of organizational improvement, Beer has put together a comprehensive and practical guide for all levels of management and organizational consultants. It focuses on both the hard issues of financial success and the softer issues of values, commitment and behavior. It is a five star book.

1 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars $26 for hardcover, $23 for kindle? Sorry, that is wrong., March 20, 2010

By 

Joshua Shipsey (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: High Commitment High Performance: How to Build A Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage (Kindle Edition)

I wanted to buy this book after I read the review in TechCrunch, but I can't support this price inflation for Kindle books. At the time of writing this review, the hardcover price is 26.37, and the Kindle price is 23.73 - a 2.64 difference. Sorry folks, this is the wrong pricing model.