IB BOOKS
Issue No. 35 - June/July 2007
High performers secrets to success
by Pamela Brombal
Achieving sustained long term growth is not an easy feat, even for large companies with big budgets to spend. Skills shortages, economic uncertainty, rapid change and managing the down time are common pressures that all businesses face, large and small.
Australian organisations and the business people that run them need to understand the structure for achieving, creating and maintaining a winning business. The First XI: Winning Organisations in Australia examines 11 of Australia's finest organisations and uncovers their secrets to success.
Written by a respected team of business practitioners and academics - Professor Graham Hubbard, Delyth Samuel, Graeme Cocks and Simon Heap - this book provides insight into the key factors that charaterise Australia's top winning organisations.
The book, which culminates years of research, is based on US studies like Built to Last and In Search of Excellence that provide strong methodology for examining overseas companies.
“Teaching in Australia, business students and executives seemed unsure who the good Australian organisations were. The Built to Last methodology and business managers encouraged me to do a Built to Last for Australia to identify the high performers and see if the principles in Australia were the same or different,” says Prof Hubbard.
Australia's winning 11 throws up some familiar names, including Brambles, Harvey Norman, Lend Lease, Macquarie Bank, National Australia Bank, Qantas, Rio Tinto, The Salvation Army, Telstra, Westfield and Woolworths.
The companies were chosen on the basis of their balanced scorecard and 'performance cube' rather than on their financial performance. The authors identified a set of generic success factors and checked these against each organisation.
They discovered a 'winning wheel' framework of nine elements that have proved to be the ingredients for continued above-average performance. These include: Effective e...
