Perform or perish

The year 2023 was tough economically, as many business owners, operators and consumers alike attest. Prices of goods skyrocketed. Interest rates were too high for business. Business leaders complained of how difficult it was to do business. Ghana’s industrial sector, according to a World Bank report, contracted by 2.2%. Oil and gas, manufacturing, water and sewerage, and construction (all subsectors of the industrial sector) shrank. The only exceptions were the mining and quarrying subsectors. Inflation was as high as 40.1% by August. It was as if we were sailing through a deadly, turbulent storm. Turbulence causes fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and insecurity. The fittest, however, survived the turbulence and made it into 2024.

The year 2024 is Ghana’s election year. We know how things run in the country during election years. This year will not be different from the others. Businesses are slowly crawling out of the old year and into the new. The forecast for the year does not look promising for now. Growth will “remain muted in 2024 at 2.8% before getting better” [see the World Bank in Ghana report at: https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/ghana/overview].

Business is a complex, competitive sport that involves every player without exception. Startups, small and medium enterprises, veterans and the grandmasters of industry must vie for their share of the market. Once inside the competition, there is no time for a break. Should you decide to take a break, you do so at your own risk. Once out, returning to the same spot is nearly impossible because competitors vie for every available space. Whatever a company’s size or age, the market makes no room for its peculiar circumstances, as is often the case in free market economies like ours.

Business is a numbers game. Every little number counts. The more points you earn in the market, the bigger your market share. The larger a company’s market share, the more money it makes. This also suggests higher profits or a higher return on investment. A high return on investment will enable a company to grow its business and expand its operations. It is, therefore, understood that a company’s market share indicates how well it is performing against the competition.

A market leader’s position may be merely 4.3 per cent share of a particular market. The loss or gain of even a 0.1 per cent share means a lot to all the players. Business competition is all about market share, and market share is about the numbers.

Christopher McDougall said, “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion, or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle; when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Perform or perish is a challenge or a dare to every business. It is more relevant in turbulent times when the stakes are higher. And such are the times in which we find ourselves today. Market positions change quickly during turbulent times. Even better-placed companies are not immune from being toppled. For that matter, when a company fails to perform, it does so at its own peril because performance is the key to survival.

When times are tough and consumers have limited funds to spend, only the players with a better performance game plan will win in the marketplace. Others will merely plod along or find the race too tough to cope with.

Sailing through 2024: the need for a winning game plan

The year 2024 is barely a month old. As slow as it may seem, the game is already on. In fact, it never stopped with the close of the old year. How did your company fare last year, and how much do you hope to achieve this year? To win in a competitive marketplace or in turbulent times, a company needs a performance game plan that is better than that of the competition and robust enough to weather the turbulence.

Management expert Peter Drucker suggested, “In turbulent times, an enterprise has to be managed both to withstand sudden blows and to avail itself of sudden, unexpected opportunities. This means that in turbulent times the fundamentals have to be managed and managed well” [Managing in Turbulent Times, p. 9]. There is no doubt that a well-conceived game plan, well executed, will yield the desired results. The opposite is also true. Without a game plan, a company gets nowhere. It cannot “withstand sudden blows” or avail itself “of sudden, unexpected opportunities.”

Options for better performance outcomes

Whether in turbulent times or regular times, all performance management plans will not yield the same results, not even for two companies in a similar industry pursuing the same form of performance management. The reason is that several other factors come into play. Back in the day, when IBM was an undisputed market leader, competing rivals poached some of its staff in the hope of duplicating IBM success methods, but it didn’t work. The reality is that different competitors achieve different levels of performance with their best efforts. It all boils down to the type of performance management an organization seeks to pursue to reach its goals and what tools and resources it has to make that possible.

All businesses, both for-profit and nonprofit, practice one of the following types of performance management: typical or standard performance, high performance, maximum performance, peak performance, and superior performance. Each of these management types has its own unique characteristics and output levels. High-performance management, for example, is a system some organizations use to improve productivity. This system ensures that the individual members of a team achieve their assigned targets.

Peak performance, on the other hand, is a system where the organizations practicing it seek to reach their full potential with the net result of an efficient, effective, productive, and profitable business.

My recommendation: superior performance

Of the various types of performance management, superior performance towers higher than the rest. It is the “crème de la crème” (the very best) in performance management, the one goal most organizations desire to attain but are incapable of doing so.

But what is superior management in the first place? It is an organization’s ability to generate high profitability and increase profit in the long haul. A company cannot be said to have achieved superior performance if its profitability and profit growth are not sustained for a period of time. It is hard to achieve superior performance, but the rewards are worth the effort. To be a superior-performing company, a company must have a competitive advantage over its rivals. In other words, it must compete and outperform its competitors. Whether it is a lion or a gazelle, a superior-performing company knows that its competitive advantage is its unrivalled ability to compete and win against its rivals in good and turbulent times.

The author is a business trainer and coach who focuses on performance management.  For more information, contact him at [email protected].