Outlook Journal, September 2006
In the October 2003 issue of Outlook, I used this space to invite our readers to join us on an exciting intellectual journey as a team of Accenture professionals embarked on an ambitious program of original research to identify and understand the characteristics of high-performance business in this era of extraordinary complexity and change.
The cover story for that issue showcased our initial findings and hypotheses, including a number of specific attributes that we believed were the most important drivers of business success. Three years and more than 30 Outlook articles later, we've completed the first stage of that journey: the creation of a solid, richly documented conceptual framework that clearly defines high-performance business and its key underlying principles. A detailed summary of that work, reflecting our newest insights, forms the basis of this issue's cover story.
Not that it was easy getting here. As someone closely involved in the effort confided to me recently, "Inquiry into the characteristics of high performance is not for the faint of heart. Imagine a room full of opinionated master carpenters, each with his or her own interpretation of good architecture and design, and favorite tools, and you have a pretty good idea of what it's like when you assemble a group of business scholars and practitioners to discuss what business success means, how to measure it and, most of all, how to obtain it."
Hard research results were the final arbiter of these lively discussions. These results were based on the work of hundreds of Accenture executives representing expertise across key business functions and more than a dozen different industries; the research included surveys and interviews at thousands of companies. During the past three years, the findings have been continually tested against Accenture's own direct experiences and observations working in the marketplace. Among the results is a mountain of pioneering industry peer group benchmarking data that will inform our ongoing research.
In the words of our cover story coauthors, Tim Breene, Accenture's chief strategy officer, and Paul Nunes, an executive research fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business: "Having established the broad principles of high performance, we've begun a new undertaking: a more detailed inspection of the practical steps to achieving business success."
The journey continues.
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief, Outlook
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