During this intriguing conversation, John argues that the reason companies have such short life spans is because they do not understand how to effectively transform themselves. This lecture defines organizational transformation as “evolving to higher levels of sustained performance.” John Lee, the author of “Rising Above it All” has found that most companies are capable of evolving to a given level of performance, which he refers to as the 95 percent level. One of the problems in transformation is that the skill set needed to reach the 95 percent performance level is not the same skill set that is needed to rise above the 95 percent level of performance. Most organizations do not understand this phenomenon, and as a result companies will eventually go extinct as customer expectations rise above the 95 percent level performance levels.

Rising Above it All breaks organizational transformation into three sub transformations:

· Personal Transformation

· Cultural Transformation

· Tools Transformation

The author argues that most companies skip the personal and cultural transformation and jump right into the tools transformation, which is the reason companies die at such a young age. The fundamental problem is that an organization must have a culture that supports modern-day analytical tools, including tools used in the planning process, or the tools will not effectively work within the borders of the organization.

A copy of John’s book will be provided to all participants.