The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else In Business

by Patrick Lencioni

Because I’m not a quantitative researcher, the conclusions I draw here are not based on reams of statistics or finely crunched data, but rather on my observations as a consultant over the past twenty years. But as Jim Collins, the research giant, once told me, qualitative field research is just as reliable as the quantitative kind, as long as clients and readers attest to its validity. And I’m happy to say that based on my experience with executives and their organizations, the principles in this book have proven to be as reliable as they are simple.

The single greatest advantage any company can achieve is organizational health. Yet it is ignored by most leaders even though it is simple, free, and available to anyone who wants it.

In spite of its undeniable power, so many leaders struggle to embrace organizational health (which I’ll be defining shortly) because they quietly believe they are too sophisticated, too busy, or too analytical to bother with it. In other words, they think it’s beneath them.

After years of off-site meetings filled with ropes courses and trust-falling exercises, even the most open-minded executives have come to be suspicious of anything that looks or sounds touchy-feely. Combine that with the notion that corporate culture has been reduced to surface-level artifacts like funky office furniture, employee yoga classes, and bring-your-dog-to-work policies, and it’s no wonder that so many leaders have become cynical, even condescending, toward most things related to organizational development.

organizational health is different. It’s not at all touchy-feely, and it’s far bigger and more important than mere culture. More than a side dish or a flavor enhancer for the real meat and potatoes of business, it is the very plate on which the meat and potatoes sit.

The Sophistication Bias:

The Adrenaline Bias:

race-car drivers’ axiom: you have to slow down in order to go fast.

The Quantification Bias: The

Organizational health permeates so many aspects of a company that isolating any one variable and measuring its financial impact is almost impossible to do in a precise way. That certainly doesn’t mean the impact isn’t real, tangible, and massive; it just requires a level of conviction and intuition that many overly analytical leaders have a hard time accepting.

An organization has integrity—is healthy—when it is whole, consistent, and complete, that is, when its management, operations, strategy, and culture fit together and make sense.

A good way to recognize health is to look for the signs that indicate an organization has it. These include minimal politics and confusion, high degrees of morale and productivity, and very low turnover among good employees.

Well, I’ve come to learn that even well-intentioned leaders usually return to work and gravitate right back to the “smart” side of the equation, spending their time tweaking the dials in marketing, strategy, finance, and so forth. Why would they do something so absurd?

“I’m looking for my earrings,” Lucy responds. Ricky asks her, “You lost your earrings in the living room?” She shakes her head. “No, I lost them in the bedroom. But the light out here is much better.” And there it is. Most leaders prefer to look for answers where the light is better, where they are more comfortable. And the light is certainly better in the measurable, objective, and data-driven world of organizational intelligence (the smart side of the equation) than it is in the messier, more unpredictable world of organizational health.

the seminal difference between successful companies and mediocre or unsuccessful ones has little, if anything, to do with what they know or how smart they are; it has everything to do with how healthy they are.