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There is a competitive advantage out there, arguably more powerful than any other. Is it superior strategy? Faster innovation? Smarter employees? No, New York Times best-selling author, Patrick Lencioni, argues that the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre ones has little to do with what they know and how smart they are and more to do with how healthy they are. In this book, Lencioni brings together his vast experience and many of the themes cultivated in his other best-selling books and delivers a first: a cohesive and comprehensive exploration of the unique advantage organizational health provides. 

Simply put, an organization is healthy when it is whole, consistent and complete, when its management, operations and culture are unified. Healthy organizations outperform their counterparts, are free of politics and confusion and provide an environment where star performers never want to leave. Lencioni’s first non-fiction book provides leaders with a groundbreaking, approachable model for achieving organizational health—complete with stories, tips and anecdotes from his experiences consulting to some of the nation’s leading organizations. In this age of informational ubiquity and nano-second change, it is no longer enough to build a competitive advantage based on intelligence alone. The Advantage provides a foundational construct for conducting business in a new way—one that maximizes human potential and aligns the organization around a common set of principles.

Patrick Lencioni is a best-selling writer of books that explore team management and is known as something of a guru in that field. He pioneered the concept of organizational health, and his company  Table Group is at the forefront of a movement to help companies achieve it.

In his 2012 book, The Advantage, Lencioni claims that “Organizational health will one day surpass all other disciplines in business as the greatest opportunity for improvement and competitive advantage.” He advises business leaders that “any organization that really wants to maximize its success must come to embody two basic qualities: it must be smart, and it must be healthy.”

He characterizes the distinction between smart and healthy aspects of a business this way:

Smart

·      Strategy

·      Marketing

·      Finance

·      Technology

Healthy

·      Minimal politics

·      Minimal confusion

·      High morale

·      High productivity

·      Low turnover

Lencioni says that smart organizations are good at the classic fundamentals of business science—but being smart is only half the equation. Equally important is a culture that fosters all the components that make a company healthy.

Unfortunately, he says, many leaders don’t embrace the idea of building healthy cultures because they can’t let go of three biases:

1.   The Sophistication Bias: It’s too simple and accessible. People with this bias believe that differentiation and dramatic improvement must be complex.

2.   The Adrenaline Bias: It doesn’t happen fast enough. Some people are reluctant to slow down to deal with issues that are critical but don’t seem particularly urgent.

3.   The Quantification Bias: It’s hard to measure. Leaders who rely only on analytics to gauge improvement are uncomfortable with the idea that you can’t isolate and assess the variables that define a healthy culture.

He urges executives who prize the “smart” aspects of building a solid business model to look at organizational health as a “multiplier of intelligence.” After spending decades working with CEOs, Lencioni observed that healthy organizations get smarter over time. But the converse is not true. “Smart organizations don’t seem to have any greater chance of getting healthier by virtue of their intelligence.”

He builds a model for organizational health on four disciplines that lean heavily on communication. Most of the book centers on explanations of these disciplines, peppered with anecdotes and real-life examples.

A crucial part of the process is that all levels of leadership have a unified perspective about the organization’s direction. Lencioni offers six critical questions to help leaders develop a cohesive approach to attain and continuously bolster company health. At the end of the book, Lencioni includes a checklist that leaders can use to gain a sense of their organization’s health and identify areas for improvement.

Take-Away

In The Advantage, Patrick Lencioni draws on his observations of working with thousands of senior executives to explain why organizational health is the key to every company’s success. The book offers pragmatic, actionable advice to remedy “unhealthy,” dysfunctional company cultures and details the financial cost of not making this a priority.