Researching and Fostering High Performance and Commitment

The TruePoint Center for High Performance and High Commitment is a research organization dedicated to the development and dissemination of knowledge about how organizations achieve and sustain high performance and high commitment.

Why we exist: High-performance, high-commitment organizations are in the minority despite research that shows they achieve extraordinary results in the long run through their distinctive approach to managing people. Their courageous leaders hold unconventional assumptions about the purpose of the firm and the values that should govern it. They believe that their mission is to create value for all stakeholders – employees, customers, investors, community and society – as opposed to creating value only for economic stakeholders, the dominant belief system today.

Our mission: TruePoint Center’s mission is to change conventional management thought and practice by bringing together like-minded CEOs who want to learn from each others’ successes and failures in building high-performance, high-commitment companies. Participating CEOs commit to opening up their organization to practical case-based research about how their firm’s transformation is progressing and to fact-based discussions of findings. Through periodic discussion with their peers and TruePoint Center’s staff, CEOs can obtain an ongoing assessment of their progress and develop new insights about how to deal with the challenges they face.

Our strategy: TruePoint Center has a small research staff augmented by academic researchers who develop, document, and disseminate research findings about high-performance, high-commitment organizations. We share our learnings through publications, and through workshops and CEO Roundtables with leaders who seek to lead the journey to high performance and commitment.

Research questions: Research parameters are framed jointly with sponsoring leaders. However, we typically investigate the following domains:

• Design characteristics. What are the capabilities, values and culture, leadership, business strategies and design features, human resource policies and practices of high-performance, high-commitment organizations?
• Change process. What is the process of corporate transformation? How best to start, sequence, spread, and sustain a transformation?
• Measuring success. What are the relevant measures that high-performance, high-commitment organizations should utilize?
• Constraints. What are the institutional and societal constraints that limit high performance and commitment? How do national culture, capital markets, conventional wisdom, firm history, unions, competitive positioning, board of directors, and other factors affect the leader’s capacity to complete the journey?
• Leadership. What leadership behavior is essential to create high performance and commitment? What personal qualities, values, education, knowledge, and cognitive abilities are essential? What are the implications for CEO compensation? What leads senior executives to begin the journey, how do they experience it over the years, and how do they deal with the inevitable dilemmas and choices they face along the way?

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