Paying the personal price for performance

Abstract

No firm can rest on its competitive laurels. Winning companies must know how to change, not just their products and services, but their business models. Changing business models used to be a once‐a‐career challenge. Now it’s the way firms compete. Most organizations have not been terribly successful at changing themselves, even at the old pace. It requires learning, becoming a “learning organization,” and building a culture of learning. But many executives aren’t buying. Many firms still relegate learning activities to the training department and look there first for cost cuts when business hiccups. Perhaps all this makes it clear why learning seems to have hit a glass ceiling. To get the benefits of learning – the management culture that makes an organization agile amidst shape‐changing markets – executives must be willing to face the cost: threatening, gut‐wrenching, personally invasive change, not just for the rest of the firm, but for the leaders themselves.

Citation

Linder, J. (2000), "Paying the personal price for performance", Strategy & Leadership, Vol. 28 No. 2, pp. 22-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/10878570010341636