Greg Long - The New Game Changers: Driving Performance by Focusing on What Matters

The New Game Changers is a compelling story with innovative and inspiring ideas. Long and Newmans TOPS model reveals that the standard way of doing business is not necessarily the path to a winning outcome. Their model is useful for all businesspeople and for anyone who is trying to help a group of people improve their performance.

Christopher Rice, President, BlessingWhite, and coauthor of The Engagement Equation

Butler and Greg have been involved in human performance improvement for over twenty-five years, in hundreds of settings around the globe. They are both relentless learners, and they have compiled an invaluable summary of their many lessons learned over the years. More important, they have developed a practical, straightforward system that will help any organization move swiftly to unlock operational excellence.

John Beakes, cofounder and COO, RWD Technologies

The New Game Changers brings to life a real-world situation I would bet most people have seen. Follow Aimees wild ride into selling internally as well as externally. Outcome selling using the TOPS checklist is an often-overlooked way to make a good sales team a great sales team. This approach reminds me of Ben Franklins comment involve me and I will learn. If you read this, you will understand what he means.

Chris Chitterling, National Account Director, US technology company

A must-read for any business leader, The New Game Changers is engaging and delightful in illustrating how to best leverage frontline performers to improve a companys bottom-line performance.

Ken Rebeck, President, KRA Associates, LLC

This book is an easy read and a practical illustration of how to maximize your greatest assetpeople. The way the story unfolds allows you to imagine how you can use Outcomes Thinking to maximize performance in virtually any situation to drive your business forward.

Gary Walker, cofounder, InteCrowd

Firms spend countless dollars seeking answers to their people performance challenges. Every firm has top performers, and the answer lies within. The road map to finding that answer lies within this book. With twenty-five years of experience in relationship management and developing relationship managers, Ive read lots of books on the subject. Few add anything new, fewer focus on results, and fewer still offer practical advice, applicable to every team. This book does all these.

Kevin Boyle CFA, Head of Private Wealth Management, Fitch Learning

An incredibly well-done job. I never would have imagined it would make me not want to put it down. While its partly my affinity for the subject matter, the unfolding of the story is really well done. The message comes across very well, and the football analogy helps significantly. The tool kit at the end is also balanced nicely.

Rick Contel, independent performance consultant

The New Game Changers uses a novel narrative format with real-world examples of the challenges every business struggles with, while providing an outcome-driven framework for success.

Christopher Lane, Vice President of Engineering and Technology, top ten market television station

Long and Newman nailed it. An orientation toward outcomes-based thinking creates a pathway toward the clarity, focus, and impact that all organizations need to thrive. This is a straightforward, immediately usable approach that can help leaders transform business results. This goes on the must-read list for leaders at all levels.

Andrew Freedman, Principal, entreQuest

Driving Performance by Focusing on What Matters

Greg Long
Butler Newman

Copyright 2015 by Greg Long and Butler Newman.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed Attention: Permissions Coordinator, at the address below.

Third Bridge Press
839 Bestgate Road, #400
Annapolis, MD 21401
www.thirdbridgepress.com

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Printed in the United States of America

Long, Greg,

The new game changers: driving performance by focusing on what matters / Greg Long, Butler Newman.

First edition.

pages cm

LCCN 2015933991

ISBN 978-0-9862531-0-2 (hardback)

ISBN 978-0-9862531-1-9 (ebook)

1. Leadership. 2. Success in business. I. Newman, Butler. II. Title.

HD57.7.L662015 658.4092

QBI15-600059

19 18 17 16 15 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To our wives, Lyn and Jill.

ITS ABOUT GETTING THINGS DOWN TO RESULTS.

Thats the key insight Jonah Hills character, Peter Brand, had in the popular 2011 movie Moneyball. Brand was trying to figure out how the Oakland As could capture a winning season without the benefit of big-name talent, but he might as well have been talking about the challenge facing any business today.

That challenge, simply stated, is this: there is not enough top talent to go around, so how do we get good, solid people to produce great results? The challenge is further complicated as companies inadvertently and incorrectly marginalize the importance of the front line by focusing instead on technology. It doesnt matter if companies are regionally or globally focused: if they hope to win in todays complex business environment, their frontline workers must perform consistently at or above standards. If they want to leapfrog the competition, companies must figure out how to develop leadership teams and frontline performers who are focused on the vital actions that actually drive the business.

But how best to do that? A solution is urgently needed. Todays corporations are dynamic environments in which leaders come and go, bottom-line pressures force us to think in the short term, and the next new idea on how to save the company is always right around the corner. Technological advances change the competitive environment and demand our attention. Old alliances fade. People are viewed as unimportant. And if it can be digitized, disaggregated, and automated, the prevailing thought is that it should be. It seems that new strategies, tools, and pressures occupy every bit of available white space in todays organizations. The clutter is suffocating, and in the deluge, the few ideas that can truly have impact are drowned out by the constant noise of the new.

We have written this book to introduce a different type of solution to this underlying and basic issue facing all companies today: creating and maintaining predictable, high levels of frontline performance.

Our approach is based on thirty years of trial and error, on the research and practices of a small group of individuals who have been committed to performance of the front line, and on, quite frankly, years of asking the wrong questions, such as What do people need to know? How do I engage the learners? and How do I modernize and mobilize my learning programs? These are not bad questions, but they have not yielded the answers that really matter. Instead, we first have to ask a much more fundamental question: