Creating High Performance

At a party tonight for my friend Anne who just received her Phd., one of my other friends asked how we could achieve optimum performance in difficult situations. She was asking this question because of the failure of America's response to Katrina in New Orleans and our recent power outage and shut roads in Half Moon Bay, CA. We are wondering how to improve a system that does not work and prepare for an uncertain future.

Reading Harrison Owen's yet to be published book, Achieving High Performance, it is clear that high performance exists when people are able to self-organize in the absence of rigid structures. The formal organization often gets in the way of high performance. Most high performance exists within the informal organization.It is the same with innovation as most innovation happens on the fringe of an organization, not within it.