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- P e r s o n a l _ C r e a t i v i t y -

Typical of our misdirected management is that we "reward" the person who is less ingenious by adding capital equipment to make up for his or her shortfalls. The message is, "If you can't do it by yourself, we'll either give you more people or some new equipment with which to do it." The bricoleur who gets the job done with the resources available is patted on the back with or without an "attaboy," but the money is invested in those people who can't or won't.

If you don't do it that way, you're already well on the way to having a high-performance organization simply because of the way you think. If you're conventional enough in your thinking still to be doing it that way, it's time to stop. You don't bet on the losing horse just because you think that might "motivate" him to win. So why put your money on losers?

In a high-performance organization, investment always follows a track record of worthy accomplishments. Where you try to compensate for poor performance by making capital investments in equipment, think again. That's not an investment decision; that's a performance decision. If you want performance you have to reward it. If you reward poor performance by giving it more attention, you'll get more of it. You don't want to measure activities. You want to measure accomplishments, and the ones who make things happen are the ones in whom you should invest.

How did we ever miss logic as simple as that?

Excerpted from Making High Performance Organizations: The Logic of Virtuosity, a book in process by Lee Thayer. Lee can be reached at 704-859-3186