Book Review: Thrive - "Culture Eats Strategy For Breakfast"
One of the best business books, diagnosing barriers to high performance at companies and offering concrete solutions.
Thrive by Andrew Freeman & Paul Elliott is just one of the thousands of books that are published annually promising to help businesses run more effectively.
Some of these books are high-level, with plenty of pseudo-profound and theoretical strategies for improving business performance. Others get down and dirty with more actionable steps and a coroner’s approach to business roadblocks: carefully removing all the company’s organs and painstakingly inspecting them for disease and sclerosis.
Thankfully for the reader, Thrive doesn’t spend a lot of time in the clouds. Instead, Thrive teaches leaders how to create clarity and alignment around what high performance looks like and how to replicate it at scale, identify and eliminate barriers to performance excellence, effectively align individual and team priorities with those of the company, and build organizational systems and processes that accelerate business and financial results.
The book provides leaders with a clear blueprint for building a high-performance culture. Drawing on extensive experience in change management, organizational development, and performance consulting, Thrive focuses on removing obstacles to high performance.
One of the five-star reviews on Amazon said it best: “The book is well-structured, broken down into a process that is easy to follow. I found the writing detailed but accessible and pleasantly free of business-school jargon. Instead, the authors explain the process (which is backed by research), provide compelling examples and case studies, and then provide leaders with the tools to go and implement these kinds of changes and improvements within their organizations. It makes for a winning and highly readable formula.”
The authors make such simple points that you wonder why so many businesses get it wrong. Consider this from the book: “Almost 55 percent of disengaged employees show up to work as sleepwalkers, not connected to the firm’s mission.”
If that’s not bad enough, consider the author’s next point: “15 percent of disengaged employees are actually saboteurs, actively working against the company.”
The authors then announce what anyone who has worked for any company of any size already knows: “70 percent of business transformation strategies and change initiates fail to deliver the intended results.”
I enjoyed the veracity of this business book. Early on, the authors admit that “This book is not about finding perpetual joy in the workplace. It’s about truth.”
The authors don’t sugarcoat it about the incompetence of many business leaders. “Most leaders don’t know what it takes to build a high-performance culture.”
The authors then make a point that must enrage some business leaders, who constantly blame their employees for their lack of performance. Yet, the authors note: “Seventy-five percent of performance barriers are attributed to organizational factors that are unrelated to flaws by individual employees.”
Consider one of the authors’ many examples: “The company culture was one of every man and woman for himself or herself and gave no consideration to the broader needs of the company.”
About at the book’s halfway point, the authors reveal the key performance myth: “One such assumption is that high performance is singularly attributable to raw talent or raw capacity. This leads to the false belief that the only way to obtain top performers is to hire exceptional talent.”
The authors then strike a nerve when they state, “Companies go out of their way to retain high performers while doing nothing to replicate their performance.”
Thrive provides business leaders with a clear blueprint for building a high-performance culture. The authors share their systematic approach, known as the Exemplary Performance System (EPS), in a way that enables leaders to take immediate action to shift workforce engagement and performance.
Thrive also gives readers access to more than twenty accelerators — downloadable tools, templates, and artifacts to help leaders implement the processes and practices that the authors share throughout the book.
As one reviewer states so eloquently:“ What I like about this book is that the authors lay out a logical system for improving performance by exposing and nurturing the attributes of star performers.”
Co-author Andrew Freedman is a Managing Partner of SHIFT Consulting, and he’s helped countless companies across diverse industries flourish through vibrant company cultures and a high-performance mindset.
Co-author Paul Elliott is the Founder and Principal Consultant at Exemplary Performance, LLC, and has spent his professional life capturing models of exceptional performance for clients around the globe.
Management guru Peter Drucker once said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Thrive authors Freeman and Elliott disdain intricate business strategies that don't factor in employee input, organizational processes that encourage high performance, and alignment up and down the company.
I remember once watching my son play soccer while standing next to a VP from a company known for its coffee and donuts. During downtime, we talked business, and he told me his company had great margins in coffee and related drinks, while donuts barely made any profit for the firm. When I asked him if the employees knew that, he responded reflexively: “They don't need to know, just do.”