Achieving Breakthrough Performance

Purpose of this article
- What are the factors which can lead to achieving "Breakthrough Performance"?

Defining "Breakthrough Performance"?
- Achieving performance disproportionately higher when compared to investment or effort input.

How can it be achieved?

A new venture or an existing company can achieve breakthrough performance by following at least some of the following:
· Dramatic improvement in performance of their own teams, which is typically achieved
- better processes, communication,
- through Better HR
§ higher inspiration level / sense of purpose (employees as stakeholders)
§ better recruitment
§ the above however are only contributory factors and will not directly result in achieving breakthrough performance

· Sales & Marketing Innovation
- Finding new customers in existing markets (such as new applications for existing drugs)
- Significantly reducing cost of sales or customer acquisition (think network marketing) (eg – Dell)
- Finding and developing newer target markets / customer segments
- Better Advertising / Brand Building
· Product/Service Innovation
- significant improvement in reducing wastage (could be of time, material, other inputs again)
- through discoveries in newer processes or materials
- Solving new problems by tweaking existing products (eg – mobile banking)
- Solving new or existing un-addressed problems (eg - blackberry)
- Significantly reducing delivery time / order servicing time (eg – Macdonalds)

· Financial Innovation
- Think low cost funds for bank/ FIs / high CAPEX industries

· Better PR
- An overlooked domain, but extremely important to achieve breakthrough performance (not to mention correspondingly higher shareholder rewards, achieved by share price commanding higher PE ratios) (eg - think Infosys)

· Servicing & Customer retention
- Especially in industries marked by high customer churn, breakthrough performance could be achieved by achieving high customer retention through better service delivery


Can you think of others? Contributions invited..