Livro
Autor: Patrick Lencioni
Edição: Março, 2012
Páginas: 240
Editor: Jossey-Bass(EUA)
"The Advantage has more common sense in its 200 pages than I have ever found in a business book. A must-read." - Colleen Barrett, president emeritus, Southwest Airlines Co.; coauthor, Lead with LUV
"Here is the next business classic. Even the best leaders will read this and wonder, 'Why aren't we already doing this?" - Enrique Salem, president and CEO, Symantec
"We are doing what most said could not be done in a down economy—start and exponentially grow a business. Using Lencioni's model for organizational health is an everyday choice and a way of life for our company." - Liz Townsend, COO, My Fit Foods
"In The Advantage, Lencioni cuts through the corporate 'bull' that creates a culture of stonewalling and feet-dragging, and shows leaders at every level how to build up a culture of productivity and communication." - Dave Ramsey, New York Times best-selling author and nationally syndicated radio talk show host
Organizational health will one day surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage.
This is the promise of The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni's bold manifesto about the most unexploited opportunity in modern business. In his immensely readable and accessible style, Lencioni makes the case that there is no better way to achieve profound improvement in an organization than by attacking the root causes of dysfunction, politics, and confusion.
While too many leaders are still limiting their search for advantage to conventional and largely exhausted areas like marketing, strategy, and technology, Lencioni demonstrates that there is an untapped gold mine sitting right beneath them. Instead of trying to become smarter, he asserts that leaders and organizations need to shift their focus to becoming healthier, allowing them to tap into the more-than-sufficient intelligence and expertise they already have.
The author of numerous best-selling business fables including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Death by Meeting, Lencioni here draws upon his twenty years of writing, field research, and executive consulting to some of the world's leading organizations. He combines real-world stories and anecdotes with practical, actionable advice to create a work that is at once a great read and an invaluable, hands-on tool. The result is, without a doubt, Lencioni's most comprehensive, significant, and essential work to date.
Sobre o autor
Patrick M. Lencioni is founder and president of The Table Group, a management consulting firm specializing in organizational health and executive team development. As a consultant and keynote speaker, he has worked with thousands of senior executives in organizations ranging from Fortune 500 and mid-size companies to start-ups and nonprofits. Lencioni is the author of nine business books with over three million copies sold worldwide. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and four boys.
Excerto da entrevista da Forbes ao autor
In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. Organizational health provides a foundational construct for maximizing human potential and aligning an organization around common objectives. The seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has less to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are.
To start, healthy organizations are void of politics and confusion. This allows people, beginning with the leader, to learn from one another, identify critical issues and recover quickly from mistakes. Healthy organizations cycle through problems and rally around solutions much faster than their dysfunctional and political rivals. This advantage occurs because “health” has a few distinctive qualities that promote sustainable success. They include:
1. Health Begets Intelligence. An organization that is healthy will eventually get smarter over time. This is true because members of a healthy organization learn from one another, identify critical issues, and quickly recover from their mistakes. They cycle through problems faster without politics and confusion. Smarter companies don’t seem to get healthier by their intelligence. In fact, it may get in the way because leaders who primed themselves on intelligence often struggle to acknowledge their flaws and learn from peers. They aren’t as open and transparent with one another, which delays recovery from mistakes and fuels politics. A healthy organization learns from its mistakes, handles critical issues with confidence and continues to grow and get more effective.
2. The Multiplier Effect. Addressing organizational health provides an incredible advantage to companies because ultimately health becomes the multiplier of intelligence. The healthier an organization is, the more of its intelligence it is able to tap into and actually use. Most organizations only exploit a fraction of the knowledge, experience and intellectual capital available to them. The healthy ones tap into all of it. A healthy organization as a whole is greater than it the sum of its parts because of this multiplier.
3. Guiding Principles. By taking the steps to become healthy, the organization must become aligned around the six critical questions fundamental to any business. The answers to the six questions provide all employees clarity and confidence to behave and act in the organizations best interest because all employees know who they, what they are trying to accomplish and how to go about it.
If someone were to offer me one single piece of evidence to evaluate the health of an organization, I would not ask to see its financial statements, review its product line, or even talk to its employees or customers; I would want to observe the leadership team during a meeting. This is where values are established, discussed, and lived and where decisions around strategy and tactics are vetted, made, and reviewed. Bad meetings are the birthplace of unhealthy organizations, and good meetings are the origin of cohesion, clarity, and communication.
Leia aqui a entrevista na íntegra.
Patrick Lencioni, autor de diversos pequenos livros de gestão e liderança em jeito de fábulas, reúne neste livro todo o seu conhecimento e experiência acerca da saúde organizacional de uma empresa. Neste associa a teoria à prática, apresentando uma proposta clara e objetiva para que o líder potencie e mantenha a saúde da sua organização, acompanhada ainda por diversos casos práticos de empresas que foram suas clientes e onde esta sua proposta foi posta em prática.
Segundo Lencioni, para criar esta vantagem, as empresas que são saudáveis ou estão a trabalhar nesse sentido, devem por em prática quatro princípios:
1. Criar uma equipa de trabalho coesa.
Uma equipa coesa gera confiança, elimina atritos e aumenta a sua eficiência através do grande conhecimento que têm sobre as debilidades e os pontos fortes de cada um, gere os seus conflitos ideológicos de forma construtiva, apoiam-se e comprometem-se uns com os outros através dos seus comportamentos e ações e comprometem-se para com as decisões do grupo.
As organizações saudáveis minimizam o risco de potenciais confusões e dúvidas através da clarificação de seis questões-chave:
- Por que é que existimos?
- Como é que agimos?
- O que é que fazemos?
- Como é que seremos bem-sucedidos?
- O que é o mais importante neste momento?
- Quem tem de fazer o quê?
3. Reforçar a clareza da comunicação na totalidade da empresa.
As organizações saudáveis alinham todos os seus colaboradores com a empresa. Conseguem-no ao comunicarem claramente as informações-chave com todos os colaboradores, repetindo-as sempre que seja oportuno, fazendo-o da forma mais simples e que menos dê azo a confusões ou interpretações erradas e através dos mais variados meios. Todas as mensagens devem ser passadas diretamente e quantas vezes forem necessárias até que todos as tenham ouvido.
4. Insistir na clareza da comunicação.
As organizações mantêm a sua saúde ao garantirem uma coerência em termos de contratações, desempenho da gestão, atribuição de prémios e louvores e de despedimentos.
"The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to everyone who wants it."