The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

The Three Laws of Performance

Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

By Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan

New in paperback with revised and updated information!

In our work lives when something isn't working, we struggle with what part of the problem to tackle first.  Do we start with cost reduction?  What about morale?  Or should we go for process improvements first? We pick the problem to work on, and depending on whether our plan makes sense, one of two things happen.  First, we fail--and then we add "frustration" to our list of problems. Two, we succeed, and then some new problem pops out to replace the old.  We cut 10% out of our budget, and our star performers leave in frustration because we sliced what they saw as a critical program.  It's as though the system we're working on is an old inner tube.  The moment we patch one hole and add pressure, another spot tears open.

The point is that it's possible to change everything at once. Seem farfetched? In Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan’s newly revised edition of The Three Laws of Performance:  Rewriting The Future Of Your Organization And Your Life (Jossey-Bass, paper 17.95, 978-1-118-04312-7, August 2011), they make a compelling argument that executives spend their time and money adjusting the systems in which people operate rather than targeting people's performance directly. When the three laws in this book are applied, performance transforms to a level far beyond what most people think is possible. 

These laws are:

Law 1:  How People Perform Correlates To How Situations Occur To Them –The First Law rejects the concept that people do what they do because of a common understanding of the facts, and instead takes the view that people do what they do because their actions are correlated to how situations occur to them.  When people understand that situations occur differently to each of us, then other people’s responses and actions suddenly makes sense.

Law 2:  How A Situation Occurs Arises In Language – How situations occur is inseparable from language.  Untying the knots of language begins with seeing that no matter what is said, other communication is carried along with it.  The unsaid – but communicated – includes assumptions, expectations, disappointments, resentments, regrets, interpretations, and more.

Law 3:  Future-Based Language Transforms How Situations Occur To People – This Law rests on an important distinction:  there are two different ways to use language.  The first use is descriptive – using language to depict or represent things as they are or have been.  The second is future-based.  It has the power to craft vision, and to illuminate the blinders that prevent people from seeing possibilities. 

According to Zaffron and Logan the key to transformation is designing a future not to solve a single problem, but to create systematic change that impacts everyone.  The Three Laws of Performance will show you just how to accomplish that.

Included in the new revised edition:

• Brand-new Introduction written for the paperback edition
• Filled with illustrative examples from Northrup Grumman, BHP-Billiton, Reebok, Harvard Business School, and many others

Available in Hardcover, Paperback and all e-Reader formats