Performance driven culture integral to success

A positive attitude towards performance is vital for business success says Gartner

Performance-driven culture will be one of the four disciplines required to support a Pattern-Based Strategy, according to Gartner. It predicts that through 2015, organisations that implement it supported by performance management applications will outperform their peers by at least 30 per cent.

A Pattern-Based Strategy provides a framework to proactively seek, model and adapt to leading indicators – often-termed “weak” signals that form patterns in the marketplace. Not only will leading organisations excel at identifying new patterns and exploiting them for competitive advantage, but their own innovation will create new patterns of change within the marketplace that will force others to react.

Gartner analysts discuss the framework for implementing and mastering a Pattern-Based Strategy at Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009, being held here through 5 November.

A successful Pattern-Based Strategy requires four disciplines to be implemented throughout the organisation: pattern seeking (seeking and exposing signals),optempo (operational tempo) advantage (improving the organisation’s competitive rhythm), a performance-driven culture (extending the traditional performance focus) and transparency (the demonstration of corporate health and strategic use of transparency for differentiation).

“The new economic environment that has emerged from the global downturn increases the pressure for organisations to adopt a performance-driven culture to support Pattern-Based Strategies,” said Yvonne Genovese, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “However, most organisations measure performance rather than managing it, but this clearly needs to change. They need to change the way they manage business performance, from a rear-view mirror perspective focused on financial measures to a perspective that focuses on leading performance and risk indicators. As a result, it provides a forward-looking focus that permeates all levels of the organisation, rather than just providing top-level measure.”