Ralph Sink on How to Bring Back High-Performance Management

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Published: Jan 24, 2019

Why are some people – Tiger Woods, Warren Buffett, Yo-Yo Ma – so incredibly accomplished at what they do, while millions of others in those same fields never become very good? Why are some people so extraordinarily creative and innovative? Why can some continue to perform great at ages when conventional wisdom would deem it impossible? Those are the questions Geoff Colvin set out to answer in Talent is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else. Geoff Colvin is a leading thinker, writer, broadcaster, and speaker on today's most significant trends in business. As a longtime editor and columnist for Fortune Magazine, he has become one of America's sharpest and most respected commentators on leadership and management, globalization, shareholder value creation, the environmental imperative, and related issues. Geoff is heard daily across America on the CBS Radio Network, where he reaches 7 million listeners a week and has made more than 10,000 broadcasts. As anchor of Wall Street Week with Fortune on PBS for three years, he spoke each week to the largest audience reached by any business television program in America. Geoff is an honors graduate of Harvard with a degree in economics, and he holds an MBA from New York University's Stern School of Business. For additional training on this topic, consider these AMA seminars: * Developing Executive Leadership To learn more, read these AMACOM Books: Becoming an Extraordinary Manager by Leonard Sandler Working Longer by William J. Rothwell, Harvey Sterns, Diane Spokus, Joel Reaser Bench Strength by Dr. Robert W. Barner“The high-performance systems approach — also known as self-organizing teams and participative management — endows people throughout an enterprise with the skills, understanding, processes, and authority they need to make their own decisions on behalf of quality and business success, instead of having all the ideas and commands flow from the top,” writes Ralph Sink in his thought-provoking article “My Unfashionable Legacy,” published in Strategy+Business. “Despite the successes of high-performance systems, the concept is less fashionable in management circles than it used to be… The next generation of managers, particularly on the operations and shop-floor side, don’t always have the skills and training to design, create, and lead high-performance systems, and there’s a real danger that this knowledge could be lost entirely. Now is the time for my colleagues and me to cast our minds back and distinguish, once and for all, the factors that made us succeed.”AMA_Edgewise_0903.mp3