Corpus Optima Currents

ClubCorp Hosts Author Dave Guerra in a Nationwide Executive Briefing

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 08:51:00 +0000

ClubCorp Hosts Author Dave Guerra in a Nationwide Executive Briefing

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Creating and Sustaining SuperPerformance - Part III: A better leadership paradigm

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:38:00 +0000

Creating and Sustaining SuperPerformance - Part III: A better leadership paradigm

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Creating and sustaining SuperPerformance - Part II: the role of the CEO

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:34:00 +0000

Creating and sustaining SuperPerformance - Part II: the role of the CEO

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Creating and sustaining SuperPerformance - Part I: Trouble Right Here. . .

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 06:31:00 +0000

Creating and sustaining SuperPerformance - Part I: Trouble Right Here. . .

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Leadership and Management Complementarity of Superperformance

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 18:30:00 +0000

"[In 1961] I had occasion to discuss Bohr's ideas with the great Japanese physicist [Yukawa], whose conception of the meson with its complementary aspects of elementary particle and field of nuclear force is one of the most striking illustrations of the fruitfulness of the new way of looking at things that we owe to Neils Bohr. I asked Yukawa whether the Japanese physicists had the same difficulty as their Western colleagues in assimilating the idea of complementarity ... He answered `No, Bohr's argumentation has always appeared quite evident to us; ... you see, we in Japan have not been corrupted by Aristotle." -- Rosenfeld, Physics Today 16, (Oct 1963), pg. 47.

So the new optimization . . .

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Wed, 27 May 2009 17:31:00 +0000

is of course about harnessing the complementarity principle in your life and in the life of your organization, for maximum benefit and value. Niels Bohr, father of BOTH the atomic understanding and the particle-wave duality (complementarity principle) brought us this understanding of reality almost a century ago. A classically mechanical view of the universe ignores the fundamental requirement for a right brain, in part because there has never been a way to interact with it, with the complementarity principle in a practical way before, in organizations. It has not been seen before now, the complementarity of fully distributed management and leadership found in Superperforming organizations . . . . It has not been conventional wisdom that super-power can become unlocked in an organization from the inside out, leading to maximum wins and astonishing levels of responsibility an commitment.

But considering that the duality of process and culture is the particle and the wave of optimization is a powerful and shockingly simple super-paradigm to adopt.

The astonishing truth is that the mechanics of super are a quantum mechanics.

The Emerging Culture Wars

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 01:07:00 +0000

Increasingly in the New Economy, the most important differentiator is proving to be corporate culture.

Research by Kotter and Heskett of Harvard Business School found that organizations with strong cultures had significantly higher performance than firms with rigid or weak cultures. The organizations with the strongest “adaptive” cultures saw their revenue grow four times faster, experienced job creation seven times faster, enjoyed stock prices that increased twelve times faster, and had 750% higher profit performance. Values guru Richard Barrett found that the return on assets and return on equity in companies with the best cultures was higher than the S&P 500 from 1991 through 1997. Malcolm Baldridge research on the comparative performance of winners against benchmark industry performance over a five-year period showed a statistically significant level of out-performance by as much as 34%.5 Denison Consultants found a similar relationship of outperformance in companies with strong cultures vs. companies with weak cultures over a 30 year period. And in our own research, the hypothetical "Superperformance Fund" outperformed the S&P 500 by a margin of five to one over a 20 year period, from 1985 to 2005.

Passion is always associated with Superperformance. This is the energy that not only produces great returns, but sustains them!

Organizations who want to be super must learn how to attract and energize hearts and minds.

People look for organizations who share their values, and organizations that align their values with those of their people are going to win the emerging culture wars.

Second Order Change

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 20:31:00 +0000

"When the manuscript for Out of the Crisis was circulating at MIT over 30 years ago we used to talk about the two hemispheres. Deming would refer to a process and a behavioral side to the thing, to optimization."
Paul Hertz, Ph.D., Deming Colleague

There is a second-order change in dimension when you go from Flatland to Sphereland.

Second order change is change that transforms a system entirely. Second order change is also defined as a critical phase transition. In a critical phase transition as the information, energy, or temperature passing through a system reaches a tipping point, the system experiences a period of perturbation, and then suddenly transformation, it has "escaped" to a new steady state.

It is the same simple experience as falling in love, first one state, then disequilibrium, then suddenly, out of time, a new state, a new "way of being." Same molecules, now transformed.

In the case of Machine View vs Organism View of organization, the change is a symmetry-breaking escape from a self-limiting paradigm of reality. The mechanistic paradigm of organization is giving way, to essentially, a quantum paradigm. The sweet spot of optimization is particle and wave and they go together.

Process and Passion, Tangible and Intangible.

The physics of optimization are quantum physics.

Deming as Servant Leader

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:20:00 +0000

W. Edwards Deming is the hero of many a Quality advocate. He learned from Shewhart the Control Chart and the Shewhart PDSA (Plan Do Study Act) Cycle that is the core of contemporary performance improvement science and practice. (See the new Deming videos.) Deming was clear about Leadership he did not equivocate. Did he have the experience of Superperformance? Certainly. He was the central champion and pioneer of the global quality movement that transformed Japanese manufacturing, and in more and more enlighted areas, is transforming organizations all over the world today. Superperformance is within anyone's reach.

On Leadership, Deming had this to say:

The aim of leadership should be to improve the performance of man and machine, to improve quality, to increase output and simultaneously to bring pride of workmanship to people. Put in a negative way, the aim of leadership is not to find failures of men, but to remove the causes of failure, to help people do a better job and with less effort.

Deming's position was that the job of the leader was to use their authority and the resources at their disposal, to make life easier and better for the people doing the work. Deming saw how western management was tethered to a business paradigm of sub-optimization.

Mechanistic management operates with the opposite paradigm. Deming describes the Biazarro World when he wrote:

Most acts of supervision in management ... instead of providing help to people, accomplish just the opposite.

Was Optimization guru Deming a robust model of Servant Leadership? Absolutely.

Study: Millenials Not Engaged

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 06:16:00 +0000

Human Resources consultant BlessingWhite recently published the results of an engagement pulse check across three generations around the world—baby boomers, Generation X and Millennials (also known as Gen Y). This was determined through a survey conducted between December 2007 and February 2008 and the results were sobering. Here are the top-line results:

Disengaged Employees Levels by Generation and Region

	Baby boomers (born 1946-1964)	Generation X (1965-1977)	Generation Y (1978-1990)
Australia & New Zealand	13%	24%	25%
China*	–	34	33
Continental Europe	18	20	28
India	16	12	14
North America	17	20	25
Southeast Asia	16	20	35
U.K. & Ireland	18	22	30

* There were too few survey responses for baby boomers in China to include.

"The research suggests that the more senior the employees, the more engaged they are," BlessingWhite CEO Christopher Rice said in a press release on the results. “Around the globe, senior executives are generally more engaged than frontline managers or individual contributors. Gen Y [Millennial] disengagement levels may reflect, to some extent, their low seniority since more baby boomers would predictably hold leadership roles. Increased engagement is an expected outcome from power and position.”

Disengaged workers can only become a larger and larger handicap for companies. India may have the answer for us. That’s because the exception to a general picture of disengagement among Millenials can be seen in India, where younger employees have higher levels of engagement compared with other regions.

Rice explained in the BlessingWhite press release. “This probably reflects the expanded opportunities as well as its young, fast-paced, knowledge-based economy. In fact, all generations in India are happier than employees in other regions.”

Millenials are our future. Often they bring a much healthier approach to work and the workplace than many older workers do. They are the first generation in history that will teach the generations before it how to make use of the next generation of technology, Web 2.0 and 3.0 tools.

We should see this global engagement survey as another wake-up call that the Knowledge Economy has arrived. Knowledge worker productivity is driven by personal engagement and commitment. Increasingly in the future, this will be the main responsibility of management. Motivation of knowledge workers requires that managers reframe their paradigms from command and control to servant leadership. Why?

Knowledge work is driven by intrinsic motivation. It is chosen.

The Super Pattern

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:44:00 +0000

Superperformers leverage passion and process to become everything they can be. We share this foundation of opposites with all of life in general. We inhabit a universe of chaos and order, left and right, male and female, expand and contract. Everyday we buy and sell, twist and turn, think and feel.

The ancient Chinese philosophy of yin-yang holds that everything in nature consists of opposite forces, which must remain in balance for life to thrive. The yin and yang are opposing forces that constantly shift, operating in continual conflict, but at the same time in need of each other for completion. These opposites drive each other towards creativity and excellence, while at the same time restraining the other to inspire harmony.

Twenty-first century physicists exploring the immutable forces of nature have come to the same conclusion. In referring to this inescapable influence, Nobel Physicist Niels Bohr’s famous complementarity principle described the paradox of the particle-wave duality encountered at the subatomic level of light. Bohr discovered that fundamentally, light consists of streams of particles (photons) that simultaneously behave like waves. Afterwards, Bohr saw evidence of complementarity everywhere. Not just subatomic particles, but all of reality, he insisted, fall under the sway of complementarity: “‘We have been forced to recognize that we must modify not only all our concepts of classical physics but even the ideas we use in everyday life . . .”

Superperformers leverage this same ubiquitous relationship. It is this interaction that is the nuclear reactor of Superperformance. This is the sweet spot. Superperformers have simply joined their tangible and intangible parts to “escape to a new level” of performance.

If there is a mechanics of optimization it must be a quantum mechanics.

Join us in Houston on March 6, 2009 for "Servant Leadership - The High Performance Link"

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:26:00 +0000

http://servantleadershipconference.com/
Servant Leadership-the High Performance Link, slated for March 6, 2009, will be held at the University Hilton at the University of Houston . This conference is a production of CEO Netweavers, the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, and the International Society for Performance Improvement.
Its’ purpose is to shine the light on servant leadership at work, especially the powerful and unmistakable connection between true servant leadership in action and outperforming return on investment, operational excellence, and joy in work.
Along with a transformational conference experience, CEO Netweavers Houston will inaugurate the Servant Leadership in Action Award, to be announced and presented to a local servant leader as a conference highlight.
CEO Netweavers is a rapidly growing organization of CEOs and their trusted advisors dedicated to transforming organizations and enriching lives through application of the principles of servant leadership and the practice of netweaving.
The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership is an international non-profit organization founded by Robert Greenleaf in 1964. Its purpose is to promote the understanding and practice of servant leadership.
The International Society for Performance Improvement is the world’s preeminent performance improvement society.

Servant Leadership is Super Leadership

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:18:00 +0000

Superperforming CEOs = Servant CEOs

It's a consistent, astonishing pattern.

Google’s Eric Schmidt, Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffett, Harley Davidson's Richard Teerlink, SYSCO's John Baugh, SW Airlines' Herb Kelleher, IBM's Tom Watson, Medtronics’ Bill George, AIM's Ted Bauer, Sterling Bancshares' George Martinez and others - all of these can be described as men of uncommon humility and personal values. Most, if not all, could also be described as people of great faith. This begs a crucial question:

Is there a correlation between Servant Leadership and Superperformance?

In describing Servant Leadership, Robert Greenleaf wrote, " “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.” (italics added)

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged . . .will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Is it actually possible to possible to achieve (or sustain) Superperformance without a CEO with a fundamental love for people?

Superperformers are always Green

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:54:00 +0000

When I’m green I’m growing, when I’m ripe I’m rotting.

Ray Krok

The Diversity of Superperformance is Biodiversity

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 21:47:00 +0000

The diversity of Superperformance is a biodiversity. Biodiversity is not just different people. It is also different work methods, different work styles, different approaches, different ideas, different answers. Biodiversity if the diversity of optimization.

The Athlete Inside Us All

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 16:21:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sun, 03 Aug 2008 04:39:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 22:04:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sun, 23 Dec 2007 16:42:00 +0000

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?

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 12:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 00:20:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 23:37:00 +0000

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.

Increasing Returns: 2 Year Anniversary of Release of Superperformance

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 03:59:00 +0000

Corpus Optima Announces 2 Additional Years of Outperforming Returns on the Anniversary of the Release of the Groundbreaking Business Book Superperformance

Houston, TX - August 22, 2007

According to Dave Guerra, author of Superperformance: New Profound Knowledge for Corporate Leaders, "After two years, the hypothetical "Superperformance Fund" continues to superperform, proving the second rule of Superperformance. (Superperformers superperform over time.) In today's uncertain times, these 10 amazing companies represent a true flight to quality, as a group turning an original investment of $25,000 into $1.650,000 today, a staggering rate of return of 22.6% per year for the last 22 years. The simple truth about Superperformance is that it can last forever."

From the Publisher

Provides corporate leaders the knowledge, tools and roadmap they need to bring about and sustain a transformation to organizational Superperformance. DLC: Corporate performance.

Cracking the Code: Is PXC the DNA?

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 15:50:00 +0000

"Rabbit's clever," said Pooh thoughtfully.
"Yes," said Piglet, "Rabbit's clever."
"And he has Brain."
"Yes," said Pooh, "Rabbit has brain."
"There was a long silence."
"I suppose," said Pooh, "that that's why he never understands anything."
The House on Pooh Corner

The evidence points to a shockingly simple idea: For organizations, PxC (process times culture) is the DNA of optimization. This simple formula and its persistent appearance in every case of sustained industry outperformance is a call for a new management science. The outdated management science we reference today is 400 years old, based on a Machine View of organization. Organizations are not machines. They are alive with processing and interaction. They evolve. They feel. They even emote.

From this framework it is much easier to see why PxC works. Process and Culture are the twin hemispheres of organizations. This leads inevitably to the need to reframe management and leadership. If you want to achieve Superperformance, you cannot afford to view them as locations, or capabilities limited to top-level practice. You have to see them as distributed properties of the whole. Management is what you do to process. Leadership is what you do to people.

From Superperformance:

‘When we begin to think of organizations as organisms, we notice that process and culture operate according to the same principles as our own brains. It is a well known fact that our brains are divided into two distinct hemispheres, and that each has separate processing and intuiting tasks. The left brain is primarily verbal, orienting to sequential, mathematical patterns, while the right brain is primarily nonverbal, orienting to parallel, holistic patterns. The two hemispheres are distinctly different, controlling different functions. But they still operate together, each lobe requiring the other for wholeness and completion.

Somewhat more obscure is the high-leverage intersection between the hemispheres, in the part of the brain known as the corpus callosum. The corpus callosum is the connecting terminal between the two lobes, the main channel between the two hemispheres, consisting of a profuse number of neural connections. It is a large bundle of more than 200 million nerve fibers that radiate throughout as well as join the two hemispheres of the brain. The corpus callosum allows the two lobes to communicate with each other. It holds the most complex group of nerves in the human body and provides for an integrated whole brain--and consciousness. It is through the neural connections of the corpus calllosum that the two hemispheres work together for wholeness. In organizations, process and culture interconnect in precisely the same way. It is through the full expression of this core partnership that organizations can become everything they can be.

Corpus Callosum

Organizations share this foundation of opposites with all of life in general. We inhabit a universe of chaos and order, male and female, expand and contract. Every day we breathe in and out, buy and sell, think and feel. Wherever you look, life organizes as polar-complements.

The ancient Chinese philosophy of yin-yang holds that everything in nature consists of opposite forces, which must remain in balance for life to thrive. The yin and yang are opposing forces that constantly shift, operating in continual conflict, yet at the same time requiring each other for completion. These opposites drive each other toward creativity and excellence, while simultaneously restraining each other to inspire harmony. To the ancient Chinese, there was nothing in life that was exempt from the pervasive influence of yin-yang.

Twenty-first century physicists exploring the immutable forces of nature have come to the same conclusion. In referring to this inescapable influence, Nobel Physicist Niels Bohr’s famous complementarity principle described the paradox of the particle-wave duality encountered at the subatomic level of light. Bohr discovered that light fundamentally consists of steams of particles (photons) that also paradoxically behave like waves. Later, Bohr saw evidence of complementarity everywhere. He predicted that knowledge of complementarity and its omnipresent influence would one day become the common knowledge of school children. Not just subatomic particles, but all of reality, he insisted, fall under its sway: “We have been forced to recognize that we must modify not only all our concepts of classical physics but even the ideas we use in everyday life.” This revelation led to Bohr’s famous choice of inscription on the Bohr family coat of arms: Contraria sunt Complementa (Latin for “opposites are complements.”)

Bohr Coat of Arms

In Biology, polar-complementarity appears in the double helix of DNA. Rosalind Franklin's famous purloined Photo 51 revealed to James Watson the double helix structure of the DNA molecule. "The instant I saw the picture my mouth fell open and my heart began to race," Watson later reported. Photo 51 resembled a fuzzy "X," whose diffracted image translated the DNA molecule for Watson into a double-helix shape. Soon after, Watson's collaborator Francis Crick read a report containing Rosalind Franklin's recent measurement of the DNA molecule. Immediately upon confirming Franklin's correlating numbers, Crick knew that they had identified the "secret of life." Crick and Watson concluded that the DNA molecule was indeed made of two strands-a double helix-running in opposite directions. The blueprint for life is made of complementary bases and twisted pairs. In a word, opposites!

Photo 51

In psychology Jung found the introvert/extrovert and thinking/feeling opposites. In mathematics we have positive and negative, linear and nonlinear descriptions—opposites again. Even in the Digital world, in binary language, we write code from a foundation of 1s and Os."

In organizations, we have this same foundation. It is much easier to see with a paradigm of organization as organism. The two fundamental building blocks, at the most elemental level of any organization, are (1) a process and (2) a person. The Superperformance Formula (Process x Culture = Superperformance) works because it captures the essence of an organization. The work of an organization (the tangible partner) is opposite from the spirit of an organization (the intangible partner.) Works needs to be controlled. Spirit needs to be liberated. Control and Liberation. Opposites.

PxC is the DNA and the Superperformance proverb, Manage Process, Lead People, is the simple, direct path to optimization.

Is Servant Leadership Super Leadership?

noreply@blogger.com (Corpus Optima) — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 04:13:00 +0000

It's a consistent, astonishing pattern.

Superperformng CEOs: Harley Davidson's Richard Teerlink, SYSCO's John Baugh, SW Airlines' Herb Kelleher, IBM's Tom Watson, Berkshire Hathaway's Warren Buffett, AIM's Ted Bauer, Sterling Bancshares' George Martinez and others-all of these can be described as men of uncommon humility and personal values. Most, if not all, could also be described as men of great faith. This begs a crucial question:

Is there a correlation between Servant Leadership and Superperformance?

In describing Servant Leadership, Robert Greenleaft wrote, " “The servant-leader is servant first… It begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, to serve first. Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead. He or she is sharply different from the person who is leader first, perhaps because of the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions. For such it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established. The leader-first and the servant-first are two extreme types.” (italics added)

“The difference manifests itself in the care taken by the servant-first to make sure that other people’s highest priority needs are being served. The best test, and difficult to administer, is: do those served grow as persons; do they, while being served, become healthier, wiser, freer, more autonomous, more likely themselves to become servants? And, what is the effect on the least privileged . . .will they benefit, or, at least, will they not be further deprived?”

Is it actually possible to possible to achieve (or sustain) Superperformance without a CEO with a fundamental love for people?