Patterns of High Performance : Discovering the Ways People Work Best

Discovering your individual High Performance Pattern-the distinctive sequence of steps you naturally follow when you are at your best-is the key to energized performance, heightened creativity, and consistent excellence. Jerry Fletcher shows how to discover your High Performance Pattern to sustain outstanding results in a variety of complex, real-life situations.

Managers and business consultants are forever forming theories about what makes people work better. Fletcher, a California-based consultant who eschews any particular "it" because individuals are different, interviewed people "about times when they had experienced doing something extraordinarly well." Using this data, he here breaks down the "consistent and unique sequence of specific actions" an individual follows "when achieving his or her personal best." Fletcher presents his techniques along with case studies analyzing characteristics of effective managers, organizational realities, motivators and individual patterns of behavior. Can high performance profiles be developed and utilized by everyone? Fletcher thinks so. But the fact that his procedures rely on the cooperation of participants and have no quality control mechanisms to ensure consistency makes this is an interesting but underdeveloped study. 10,000 first printing; $20,000 ad/promo.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

I recommend this book to any individual or organization interested in the higher reaches of human performance in business.

Anyone who reads this book carefully is bound to see something new in his or her own behavior, and something new about how to deal with others.

Fletcher offers a new way of producing the best from people, both in work and in personal situations. Essentially, his philosophy centers on celebrating the uniqueness of each person. There's no jargon and, better yet, no morale issues involved here. Beginning with two case histories, the author asks managers to relate their best examples of success and, from those, outlines the steps they take to achieve results. Whether dealing with a stubborn landlord or eliminating workplace barriers to a family vacation, high-performance patterns may prove to be more than just another management trend--and a real boon in establishing multicultural diversity. Barbara Jacobs

Some books by management consultants offering advice on how to get ahead in the business world do provide results, though many more seem to be written to promote the author's name and company. Fletcher is himself a management consultant and is, indeed, promoting his firm's program for increasing an individual's performance. The difference is that he isn't stressing how a person should change but instead showing how a person can discover his or her own unique pattern of high performance. He also gives numerous case studies showing how this insight can be applied. Interesting, practical, and unique, this work is recommended for larger public and academic libraries.
- Robert Logsdon, Indiana State Lib., Indianapolis
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.