Excellence

Read Anita McGahan's full blog post, "Pi-Squared Part 3: Excelling in Value Creation"

Lafley and Martin describe this critical step as finding an answer to the question, "How will you win ?" But at the public-private boundary, "winning" may never occur because the achievement of superior performance  in the sense of better performance than other organizations rests on an assumption that somebody else is actually trying to create value in a way that is comparable. When a private-public collaboration is created to do something entirely new and impossible to pursue otherwise, there are pretty much by definition no benchmark organizations against which performance can be assessed. So what’s the best alternative ?

In the Pi² initiative, we think about "excellence," which we will define as satisfaction of the needs of those for whom we seek to create value. We won’t be seeking perfection, but we will be striving for a level of achievement that leads those served to become advocates for continued action in an initiative. This will require more than only satisfying needs. It also requires that stakeholders understand that the initiative is the source of the "win". In other words, it's not enough to achieve excellence; it's also critical that the excellence is demonstrably linked to the initiative itself and that stakeholders want it to continue.