The Athlete Inside Us All

There is an athletic quality to Superperformance. Maximum fitness and peak performance are both associated with the qualities of an athlete. So too it is with organizations. The best organizations are athletic. They are both fit and well. Their fitness is reflected in their process and their wellness is reflected in their culture. Their fitness is a measure of their health. If your organization is struggling in either area it is being suboptimized. This is another reason that Servant Leadership is the pattern of Superpeforming CEO. Gregg Stocker's terrific book The Corporate Death Spiral outlines the 7 most destructive unhealthy habits of organizations. What are vital signs we should monitor continually?

Transformation to Superperformance

We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Max DePree

Superperformance is available to all, but it requires transformation to a new state. This is the same kind of comprehensive change that occurs when water turns to ice. Transformational changes of this type abound throughout nature - the epidemic transmission of a virus, the critical mass of a runaway social trend, metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly, and even certain emotional changes, like the process of falling in love. The change is comprehensive and dramatic. This is called a phase transition, a state change that occurs without altering a system’s underlying chemical composition. Phase transitions are sudden, non-linear, and system-altering. The physics of a phase transition are analogous to transformational change in other systems, including social ones. In a phase transition, as the energy, temperature or information passing through the system increases, the current threshold is approached and crossed, provoking a sudden, discontinuous, system-level change. First the system is operating at one level, then suddenly, another. While transformation is typically an achieved state, the physical change occurs suddenly, triggered by a slight increase in energy, temperature or information, as in the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. At this critical juncture, the tipping point, the system reaches a high level of disequilibrium, then finally gives way, becoming fundamentally altered as it experiences transition to the new steady state. As with any phase transition, transformation is always associated with an increase in energy, information or temperature. During the development of the adult butterfly, for example, the chrysalis loses nearly half its weight. This shows that the experience of transformation consumes tremendous energy. In the same way, upshifting to Superperformance consumes tremendous energy instituting new habits while simultaneously surrendering old ones.

New adventure

CEO Netweavers, The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, and the International Society for Performance Improvement are joining forces to shine the light on Servant Leadership and its association with outperformance. Join us on November 4, 2008 for this new adventure in optimization. www.servantleadershipconference.com

Santa Superperformer

What better example of Superperformance is there than old St. Nick himself? He certainly outperforms his industry peers; no one can match his process. On one tiny sleigh with eight reindeer he travels around the world in one night for a delivery performance that even mighty Fedex has to envy. Who can forget the coup de grace of Rudolph, who single-handedly changed Christmas history with the innovation of the blinking red nose? And who wouldn't prefer to operate as Santa does, without the need for a return and complaints department? This of course, is due to his army of highly trained, inspired, and customer-focused elves who somehow manage to fill every order just right. That is one committed workforce. Santa has mastered the process and the culture side of the equation. He has Superperformance down pat.

For your convenience, if you are planning to leave Santa some cookies and milk to fortify him for his yuletide mission, here are some delicious Christmas cookie recipes from around the world.


Have a wonderful Holiday. We'll see you next year.

A Marriage Made in Optimization Heaven?

Nonprofits live in a perpetual state of lack and are often psychologically constrained by a paradigm of 'not as good as". For-profits live in a perpetual state of sub-optimization due to a preoccupation with tangible over intangible. Wouldn't it be great if there was a meaningful way to draw the best of both worlds to eachother? What if the for-profit community could teach the nonprofit world to operate more like a business, to understand systems, to measure and improve process performance, for example? And what if the nonprofit community could teach the for-profit world to treat people like volunteers, to liberate the hero inside of everyone?

Why wouldn't an initiative like this-blending Servant Leadership with Liberated Heroes- lead to a transformation in both communities?

Fame is Fleeting

Two Superperformance stories, "What Makes a Superperforming CEO?" and"Who's Next?" were bumped to the front page of Forbes.com today. Exciting news for the Corpus Optima family and for advocates of Servant Leadership andSuperperformance. Earlier this month Dave Guerra spoke about the 'way of being'of a Superperforming organization to a record crowd for Houston's OrganizationDevelopment Network. In today's world of information overload and nonosecondexposure, fame is especially fleeting. But one thing that doesn't flee is thetruth. Truth is evergreen. And if Manage Process, Lead People is the essential heurisitic, if PxC is the true sweet spot of Superperformance, the signal can only grow stronger. Eventually truth will out. Truth is a witness unto itself.

Here Come the Intangibles

Herb Kelleher, long term CEO of Superperformer Southwest Airlines, dubbed by Fortune Magazine as perhaps the greatest CEO in history, sees the invisible part of Southwest Airlines as the company's greatest (and most perishable) asset: "What keeps me awake at night are the intangibles. You can get airplanes, you can get ticket counter space, you can get tugs, you can get baggage conveyors. But the spirit of Southwest is the most difficult thing to emulate. So my biggest concern is that somehow, through inattention, through misunderstanding, we lose the esprit de corps, the culture, the spirit--if we ever lose that, we will have lost our most valuable competitive asset."

Astonishingly, the intangible dimension today makes up more than 70% of most companies' stock market value. Google this month raced past Wal-Mart in market capitalization - $220 billion vs. $182 billion - based almost entirely on intangible value. The New Economy is here. These days, it is not fixed assets but intangible expectations of future success that drives a company's value. In a recent article, New York Times reporter Denise Caruso lamented, "Today's sophisticated knowledge economy is stuck with the equivalent of an abacus for measuring the actual financial value of corporate assets and liabilities. . .today's markets are being transformed by intangibles, and a growing number of companies are scrambling to find the methods that will help them better use, develop and communicate about them."

Intangible comes from the Latin tangere, to touch. Intangible means untouchable. Download this chapter from Moving the Needle, Measuring Things Hardly Measured, to learn more about how Superperformers leverage intangibles - the spirit of the company.