Achieving high levels of performance is hard enough, but sustaining those high levels over a prolonged period of time is incredible difficult, especially in a rapidly changing environment such as we operate in today.

So a new study that explores how companies can achieve that sustained excellence should be of interest to managers everywhere.

The companies chosen for the study were those who had been recognized by trade associations as having been high-performing businesses.  Managers at each firm were then quizzed to understand both the performance of the firm, and the environment within which they operated.  The researchers also analyzed financial performance and internal audits to better understand the quality of the products and services on offer.

What makes for sustainable excellence?

After controlling for as many possible external factors as possible, the researchers honed in on a number of factors and capabilities that underpinned sustainable excellence:

• Innovation – which is defined as the ability to create new products and enter new markets
• Improvement – unlike innovation, which is defined in more radical terms, improvement refers to more incremental improvements to products and services
• Spotting weak signals – there are always things one can do that make an outsized impact, and always blind alleys that can see a lot of time and energy wasted.  The best performers were exceptional at spotting the difference and understanding the wider business environment they operated in.
• Adaptability – if the previous capability falls under the ‘sense’ part, then this could neatly be defined as the ‘respond’ aspect of Stephen Haeckel’s sense and respond approach.  It relates to the ability of a company to solve unexpected problems and function in a complex environment.

Suffice to say, each of these capabilities impacted different aspects of high performance.  For instance, improvement was more important for maintaining high consistency, whereas innovation was more valuable in improving quality.

Likewise, adaptability was more important for the quality levels, whereas sensing was more useful in maintaining consistency.

As with so much in life, the key isn’t to focus on one or two of the above, but to strike a balance across all four capabilities.  The results suggest that if you can master them all, then your chances of sustaining excellence go up considerably.