Corporate Culture The Key to Top Performance

1) A key to development is to give good people big jobs before they expect it. 

Only 10 percent of the executives surveyed strongly agreed that their companies used assignments as an effective development lever. 

2) Extensive feedback and coaching is an important facet of developing people. While most companies have appropriate systems in place, execution is often not as good as it should be. Only 30 percent of executives rate their company as excellenf or very good at providing informal feedback and coaching and only 25 percent are satisfied with the way they are mentored. 

Even when a company has the right strategy, the right structure, and the right people, it may still not be one of the small band of truly excellent companies -the ones that outperform the competition year in, year out. We believe that the secret of top performing companies success, whether in chemicals or other industries, lies in management systems and processes that build up a distinctively strong corporate performance ethic . 

1996 versus 14 percent for the Fortune 500 and 13 percent for the Dow Jones in-dustrial average). In addition, we talked to a host of managing partners from private equity companies with a reputation for turning around the performance of acquired companies fast, and to a selection of the most renowned academics in the field. 

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