Prescription for Organizational Wellness

A program for managing your organization’s health is founded on the answers to four questions:

  1. What are the variables that influence your organizations performance?
  2. What is the role that each variable should perform?
  3. How do the variables interact in a way that contributes to your overall performance mosaic?
  4. What can you do to improve performance?

Organization Performance: Knowing the Variables
Organization wellness, like human wellness, is a designation that is never reached. …this book uses these four questions as the vehicles for describing the journey. To begin, we need an organization model that is the rough equivalent of a cutaway view of the human body. This Enterprise Model will serve as the anchor for our exploration of performance improvement.

At the most macro level, there are two sets of performance variables: those that are outside the organization (and, in many cases, outside its control) and those that are internal (and often seem to be out of control). There are three factors in the internal equation: structural variables, human variables, and variables that have both a structural and human dimension.

  • External variables: customers, suppliers, competitors, government, the economy, society, shareholders
  • Structural variables: organization structure/roles, business processes, goals/measurement, information management
  • Human variable: leadership, culture, human capabilities
  • Structural and human variables: strategy, issue resolution.

Next excerpt: Setting Goals and Measuring Progress