Your company has already right-sized, cut costs, improved efficiency, and flattened the org chart. Yet profitable and sustainable growth remains elusive. Fortunately, according to Susan Lucia Annunzio, you don't have to look far for the solution. Somewhere in your organization, right now, are high-performing workgroups that are generating profitable new ideas. These workgroups might consist of a few people or a few hundred; they might be fixed departments or ad hoc teams working on specific problems. Whatever their size, they are the best answer you have to the creative and competitive demands of today's marketplace.

Susan Lucia Annunzio is chairman and CEO of the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, a subsidiary of Hudson Highland Group, Inc.

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
It's the Workgroup	p. 1
Look Within	p. 20
Build It and They Will Come	p. 43
Room to Grow	p. 73
Move the Middle	p. 112
How to Destroy High Performance	p. 134
Results the Right Way	p. 157
Defying Conventional Wisdom	p. 176
Conducting the Study	p. 191
Variations Among Knowledge Workers by Country and Region	p. 201
Factor Analysis	p. 239
The Global Average	p. 241
Bibliography	p. 243
Index	p. 247
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Chapter 1 It?s the Workgroup Success is contagious. That?s the premise of this book. Every company has high-performing workgroups that both make money for the business and develop new products, services, or markets. These workgroups create environments in which results are achieved and people flourish. High-performing groups adapt quickly to changes in the marketplace, understand their customers, and know how to get the internal resources they need to accomplish their goals. If you spread the secrets of these groups, you can improve the overall performance of your company. Just as the leaders of Wal-Mart think of their highly successful company as a series of individual stores, you can think of your company, regardless of size, as a series of workgroups. As Robert Slater wrote in The Wal-Mart Decade, ?. . . the only way to manage such a large and complex organization is to think of it not as large and complex, but think of it as simply a series of individual units, that is, the stores. ?We run the business a store at a time,? said [David] Glass [president and CEO from 1988 to 2000]. ?How do you run a $240 billion retail business? I don?t have a clue. But I know how to run retail stores.? ? How do you run a business in today?s uncertain global environment? How do you improve performance in an era of tightening budgets, reduced resources, and increasing demands? The answer is to support your workgroups so they can generate new ideas to fuel profitable growth. A workgroup can be a few people or a few hundred; it is the unit responsible for driving results. Workgroups can be formed based on functional areas (the marketing department); divisions within functional areas (the creative group); client; or product line. They can be permanent, or temporarily brought together to achieve a single purpose. Workgroups form their own smaller cosmos within the larger company. They are united by common goals and shared experience. In this book, I will introduce you to some highly successful workgroups. Among others, you will meet: ? the Green Diesel Technology team at International Truck and Engine Corporation, which played a major role in preserving the diesel industry while creating a significant growth opportunity for the company. ? the People and Culture department at Microsoft UK, which helped make the company the United Kingdom?s IT employer of choice, and generates 30 percent more revenue per employee than any other division of Microsoft worldwide. ? the Kellogg Food Away From Home marketing department, whose efforts resulted in nearly 10 percent profit growth between 2002 and 2003. Growth due to innovation tripled between 2001 and 2003. ? the Foreign Exchange Institutional Sales team at ABN AMRO, which advises financial institutions on how to optimize returns on currency management. The team was on pace to achieve $20 million in revenue in 2004, up approximately 67 percent from $12 million in 2002.All of these workgroups have created high-performance environments that deliver exceptional results. Unfortunately, there are too few of such groups. Recent groundbreaking research on the workgroups of knowledge workers found that only 10 percent of these highly paid and well-educated respondents could provide evidence that their workgroup was high performing?that it made money for the company and introduced new products, services, or processes. The study was undertaken by the Hudson Highland Center for High Performance, which I lead. (See Appendix 1 for details on how the research was conducted.) To increase performance, companies need to focus on the single factor that is most critical to high performance?the environment of their workgroups. According to Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University, ?Four decades of scientific research have shown that situations are powerful determinants of human behavior?and mu