New book shows how people can adopt winning behaviours

People engaged in a variety of corporate activities can be helped to adopt the winning ways of high performing superstars. The productivity of key workgroups and corporate performance can be transformed to deliver commercial success for organisations and personal satisfaction for individuals.

It sounds too good to be true, but a new book Winning Companies; Winning People by Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas shows how it can be done. The book draws upon a research programme that identifies critical success factors and winning behaviours for important activities; and the practical experience of innovative companies that incorporate them into work processes and job support tools to enable users to emulate the approaches of high achievers.

Coulson-Thomas’ research reveals that some people are so much more effective than others who undertake similar tasks in equivalent circumstances. He examines what ‘top quartile’ high performers do differently in order to identify critical success factors for important areas such as winning business, building relationships, pricing, purchasing and exploiting know-how.

Over 4,000 organisations from smaller firms to major corporations have already participated in the continuing research programme led. Some 2,000 of these have contributed to studies to identify critical success factors and winning behaviours for key business development activities. The differing behaviours of winners and losers are summarised in Winning Companies; Winning People and the critical success factors that have been identified are set out in over twenty research reports that are also published by Policy Publications (see http://www.policypublications.com).

According to Coulson-Thomas, “The findings are remarkably consistent across sectors, professions, corporate nationalities and different sizes of organisation. Areas examined range from communicating to visioning. Because most success factors are attitudinal and behavioural, investigating teams can distinguish the approaches of high performers or winners from the practices of low achieving losers.”

Coulson-Thomas believes “The Winning Companies; Winning People investigation represents good news for people and organisations who would like to raise their game. For those wanting to build businesses and achieve their full potential it provides a compendium of the differing approaches of winners and losers and examples of what can be done to help under-achieving people adopt the approaches of their more successful peers. Individuals, entrepreneurs, managers, coaches and consultants can also use this book as a tool to identify losing behaviours that need to be addressed.”

The investigating teams find that in many sectors leading competitors have similar offerings, adopt prevailing technologies and systems, recruit from the major business schools, fall for current management fads and employ the same or similar professional firms. Yet when they examine a particular area such as competitive bidding huge variations of performance are evident.

Individual studies within the research programme rank participant’s attainments in relation to outcomes achieved from the most to the least successful. The approaches of high and low achievers – for example, those in the top and bottom quartiles of accomplishment – are then compared to isolate critical success factors that explain the differences of attainment.

Over 100 exercises have now been undertaken by Prof. Coulson-Thomas to build critical success factors into the processes and practices for winning business of particular companies. He finds “Identified winning ways can be quickly adopted. Every participant in the research programme could boost performance by embracing additional critical success factors and adopting more winning approaches.”

Coulson-Thomas explains “People don’t jump out of bed in the morning eager to rush into the office to struggle and fail. They want to do well. When critical success factors and winning ways are explained people understand and adopt them. The challenge for organisations has been to find a cost-effective way of enabling significant numbers of people in scattered locations to quickly emulate winning ways.”

The Professor feels his new book will show that help is at hand: “A new generation of practical job support tools are transforming workgroup productivity and corporate performance (see http://www.cotoco.com). Because they make it very easy for people to do difficult jobs in a winning way they can be rapidly deployed without the problems normally associated with the management of change. They represent a cost-effective and superior alternative to traditional training and consulting interventions.

‘Winning Companies; Winning People, Making it easy for average performers to adopt winning behaviours’ by Colin Coulson-Thomas (ISBN 978-1-872980-72-0); Price £24.95 plus postage and packing) is available from Policy Publications: Tel. +44 (0)1733 361149; Fax. +44 (0)1733 361459; on-line from http://www.coulson-thomaspublications.com or all good bookshops.

Professor Colin Coulson-Thomas an experienced chairman of award winning companies has advised over 100 boards and helped over 100 entrepreneurs and their business development teams to build businesses. He can be contacted by Tel: + 44 (0) 1733 361 149; Fax: + 44 (0) 1733 361 459; email: colinct@tiscali.co.uk or via http://www.adaptation.ltd.uk or http://www.policypublications.com