Wiring the Winning Organization

In this powerful new book, bestselling and award-winning authors Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear present a surprisingly simple theory to explain outstanding organizational performance… and show you how to replicate it in your own enterprise.

Each drawing on three decades of research and working with high-performing organizations across almost every industry and phase of value creation, Kim and Spear have come to a surprising conclusion: winning comes from how leaders deliberately design their management systems around people’s ingenuity and how individuals’ creativity is integrated into a collaborative effort. This liberates the capabilities of the people within the organization, enabling them to continually push the frontiers of performance. These leaders have wired their organizations to win.

This is opposed to leaders who set their focus first on maximizing efficiency and optimizing for functional specialties, relying on planning, scheduling, and expediting, and yet never realizing those goals. Instead, they create high coordination costs and increase cognitive burden, all of which constrain and sometimes even extinguish people’s ability to contribute. This is how leaders wire an organization for dismal outcomes.

These results shouldn’t be surprising. After all, on an otherwise level playing field, the only source of sustained competitive advantage is how well people’s intellectual capabilities can be engaged. Kim and Spear explain how organizations can move from the danger zone to the winning zone by employing three key mechanisms: slowification, which makes problem-solving easier to do; simplification, which makes the problems themselves easier to solve; and amplification, which ensures problems are seen and solved.

Using over twenty case studies that span a wide variety of sectors, Kim and Spear present a new theory of performance and management that shows how the decisive factor in high-performing enterprises is organizational wiring that enables innovation, excellence, and greatness to flourish. Wiring the Winning Organization teaches leaders how to move from the danger zone to the winning zone to achieve greater agility, higher quality, faster time to market, greater resilience, and higher employee engagement and profitability.