Neils Bohr, father of Quantum Mechanics and the Particle-Wave Duality, understood Superperformance. Bohr’s famous family coat of arms includes the Latin inscription; Contraria sunt Complementa, which means “Opposites are Complements.” Well if opposites are complements, then complements must surely be opposites. Therefore it is not the complementarity principle-but the polar-complementarity principle that quantum mechanics relies on. This new language, which Bohr predicted would one day become “the common knowledge of schoolchildren,” is the water we swim in, the reality we inhabit, but cannot see from “Flatland.”

But no longer in organizations. We now have the night goggles of living and complex-adaptive systems, a new biophysics of Super, to light the way into our Super Future. Here are 10 polar-complements to try on for super-size. Surf between them with ever decreasing variation and your performance will skyrocket. Living in either pole exclusively is the province of fools and the source of much of the organizational, project, community, and even individual sub-optimization occurring today.

• Process & Culture
• Management & Leadership
• Control & Liberation
• Physical & Spiritual
• Being & Doing
• Empowerment & Responsibility
• Reality & Possibility
• Involvement & Commitment
• Reflection & Execution
• Desire & Action

So jump in and enjoy the waves. Cowabunga.

Superperformance occurs inside of a context. The classic industrial model of command and control underlying traditional management practice is not sustainable in the 21st century. A new organizational framework is needed.  It must be agile, super focused, operate from simple rules, and clarity of purpose. Advancements in optimization knowledge and information technology—together with a revolution in leadership—provide executives an unprecedented opportunity to put in place a new superstructure and system of support. This new framework must be one that creates the context for Superperformance—and its long-term sustainability. To achieve maximum fitness this system and structure must be agile, innovative, and resilient. It must facilitate the merger of process and culture. It must be based on a dynamic, not static view of organization. This superstructure must be based on a living, complex adaptive systems view of organization—alive and self organizing.  Organism, not Machine.

Goodbye Taylorism, Hello Life Science.

(From Creating and Sustaining Superperformance by Barbara Brown, Examiner.com)

The Role of the CEO

Bohr’s particle-wave duality. Faraday’s electromagnetism. Watson & Crick’s DNA molecule. Jung’s thinking-feeling opposites. Prigogine’s dissipative structures. Our own brains, with their left and right hemispheres – all point to the same glaring and pervasive pattern throughout all of nature — and in organizations too. Because of our mechanistic paradigm of organizations, it has been hidden before now. The Cartesian worldview is over 400 years old, and is reinforced through the almost century-old Taylor model, scientific management.

When organizations are reframed as living, complex adaptive systems (organisms), the simple heuristic of ‘manage process, lead people’ appears as the obvious and direct path to optimization. The evidence is that long-term market out-performers, i.e. Superperformers, all exhibit this pattern. The control that is called for is control of process, and the liberation that is called for is the liberation of spirit. The biophysics that guides this new paradigm weds the biology of improvement science to the physics of complexity science. Like Bertalanffy’s general systems theory, this new discovery transcends every business discipline, every domain. Performance Management, Talent Management, Project Management, Diversity Management, Knowledge Management, Change Management etc. . . . all give way, shifting in orientation from management to optimization, which joins management and leadership together as necessary and complementary hemispheres.

It is Performance Optimization, Talent Optimization, Project Optimization, Knowledge Optimization, and so on, that supplants management as the superior objective. Superperformers already know this and operate intuitively from this paradigm. Furthermore, this new knowledge recasts management and leadership: from a view of them as hierarchical locations to a view of them as distributed enterprise-wide properties, akin to your own immunity, consciousness, or nervous system.

Organizations of every type can access this new knowledge to reconstitute business strategy and transform performance.

Yes the evidence is that Superperformance  is available to all. But today’s lingering, strictly mechanistic models of management and leadership only take things further in the wrong direction. New knowledge and methods are needed to transcend these caveman paradigms.

Superperformance is a next-generation performance optimization approach that turns conventional wisdom on its ear.

It introduces a new category. As a group, organizational Superperformers outperform the S&P 500 by a margin of almost 5 to 1. They dominate their industries, produce a steady stream of breakthrough operating results, reach coveted levels of customer delight, and are able to continually accelerate and make responsive every aspect of their operations–over exceedingly long periods.

These organizations share the same remarkable traits.

• They all prove the Superperformance Formula (PxC=SP) and harness the same natural laws.
• They all outperform their industry peers over exceedingly long periods.
• They all are led by Superperforming CEOs, who are true servant leaders.

This exciting new approach can be applied to transform performance on any scale in any organization. Superperformance directly challenges prevailing leadership and management paradigms–and rewires many traditional assumptions about organizations and how they operate.

We urgently need to transcend obsolete management practices and operating models and recast organizations as living, complex-adaptive systems–and performance as their emergent fruit. There are numerous real life examples of Superperformance- that when examined as a group -reveal an entirely new understanding of organizations and their hidden potential.

The evidence pulls back the skin of a new life science and  introduces a new biophysics of optimization.

1 Simple Formula, 8 Simple Rules, One Billion Great Results

In this groundbreaking new book, Dave Guerra proposes a stunningly simple way through today’s complex world of work, introducing us to a new management science, showing how Superperformance springs from the intersection of an organization’s process and its passion. Guerra proposes a simple formula:

Process x Culture = Superperformance.

This book is about the phenomenal year-after-year success of companies who consistently apply this formula. It is about the simple rules that have enabled companies like Toyota, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Harley Davidson and others to achieve and sustain super results year after year.