Superperformance
8 Strategies to Reach Full Potential for Yourself, Your Team, and Your Organization
Addressing universal business struggles in a down-to-earth manner, Superperformance is an insightful leadership guide.
Introducing strategies to foster personal, team, and organizational achievements, business consultant George Pesansky’s leadership guide Superperformance is about moving businesses from good to great results.
Focusing on values like vision, strategy, and action and placing the most attention on strategy, this leadership guide is about breaking free from the limitations of expectations, learning to focus, selecting projects in a thoughtful manner, and being conscientious about how one works with others. In its effort to help organizations “perform better and enable their teams to succeed,” it makes use of familiar analogies, as of using a compass to find direction and stay on track, to illuminate its points throughout.
Familiar insights such as “[As] your competence in any area of knowledge increases, so does your confidence” arise. Indeed, the book’s sourcing is wide, and pull quotes from inventors and references to other business books appear as well. To maximize its applicability, it includes bullet lists of reflection questions and chapter summaries that give guidance for implementation.
Ranging personal anecdotes are used to show the book’s principles in action, musing on times that Pesansky trained employees and managers in problem-solving methods and using his father, who had a decades-long career at Corning, as an example: He is said to have focused on “leading indicators—things that tend to lead to success when they’re done correctly: the work, the people, and the process; the what, how, and why.” Such examples enliven the book and ground its recommendations well.
Some of Pesansky’s observations, as of employees tossing rather than saving ear plugs at a manufacturing plant, and about using newspaper for streak-free window cleaning while working as an undercover housekeeper, are quite down to earth. And while homey stories about tackling yard work and making small talk at parties may take the book beyond a business context, they also exist in piquing contrast to its sophisticated analyses of complications that arise during production processes and other big-picture concerns. The book’s reliance on acronyms with long definitions makes some points less accessible, though.
The book is at its most incisive when it focuses on universal struggles, as when it comes to employees resisting new ideas. On such topics, it shares lucid tips for bridging common gaps. Notes on the human tendency to focus on failures rather than successes are also illuminating. Images including tables and figures help distill the book’s more conceptual ideas, as with an image of three overlapping circles used to illustrate the components of superperformance, or with another that breaks the utility concept into identifiable parts.
Superperformance is a realistic and actionable leadership guide that encourages businesses to identify and multiply the root causes of their successes.
Reviewed by
Andrea Hammer
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
