I read an interesting article in the Harvard Business School, Working Knowledge website. It is essentially a book review of esteemed professor Michael Beer. His new book is called High Commitment High Performance: How to Build a Resilient Organization for Sustained Advantage. The book explores long-term successes like Southwest Airlines, Johnson & Johnson, Hewlett Packard, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, etc. It got me wondering about nonprofits leveraging these same skills.

Beer says that what allows these organizations to have sustained performance is performance alignment, psychological alignment, and capacity for learning and change. With regards to performance alignment, he refers to goals and measures aligned to a winning strategy. That sounds like a Balanced Scorecard to me. Many people ask "How do you know you have a good strategy?" Well, with a Balanced Scorecard, you get immediate feedback through the measures. This allows you to adjust your strategy along the way.

With psychological alignment, he is referring to meaningful and challenging work that relates to the performance of the organization, and with the capacity to learn, Beer is referring to honest and collective conversations about what stands in the way of success and being able to enable success throughout the organization. Beer says also that the organization must have a clear purpose and strategy as well as a good understanding of risk, and they must motivate their employees by this purpose and strategy. These all sound like things that will apply to nonprofit organizations.

Of course a lot of the change the Beer recommends is related to exceptional qualities in leaders and leadership. Fortunately in the last 10 years of focusing on performance management, I have seen more great leaders in nonprofit organizations than for-profit ones. Organizations looking to create the sustained success as described by Professor Beer should implement the Balanced Scorecard and become true strategy focused organizations. I'd be interested in hearing of any additional organizations you think might stand up to the test of this book.