The biggest Management tragedy of last century has been estimated loss of multiple trillion dollars on count of the opportunity and discretionary Human performance loss across diverse Organization due to low to zero priority on CULTURE. This tragedy will continue in the current and future virtual century provided not averted and de-risked by immediately choosing Plan C.

Achieving a high-performance culture is and will be every CEO’s, business and human resources leader’s only choice for sustainability and growth because fast paced Technology and Virtual reality will be ruthless in being biggest leveler and being very demanding towards superlative consistent performance or perish.

In order to achieve sustainable, profitable growth by design, a paradigm shift is needed from an execution-led plan A (Action) and a risk mitigation and management–led plan B (Back up) to a high performance, values, and innovation–led plan C (Culture).

This book, Plan C, will provide an insightful, pragmatic and simple road map to build and sustain a high-performance culture by challenging various paradoxes and paradigms of the hi-tech virtual world and  impacting them with a hi-touch cultural leadership led by a new CEO (Culture of Excellence in Organizations).

CEO and top leadership should be cognizant of different types of paradoxes, in order to comprehend their genesis, and address them prudently to build a high-performing organisation.

Distinguish Plans A, B, and C, based on the mindset that drives them, including the CEO’s style of action and decision making. Based on the differentiation, prioritize the A B C of sustainable success in terms what is most important. Technology is the biggest leveler, as it provides an equal playing field to all kinds, natures, sizes, and scales of organisations. What defines the relative performance is how the human factor can leverage the machine factors in a virtual ecosystem.

Biggest corporate myth has been busted: The statement “Culture takes many years to build and mature” is not true. It can change immediately, based on the CEO’s personality and its strong influence on the organisation’s way of working.

The estimated loss of organisations worldwide, on account of having little or no focus on using culture to achieve sustainable performance, compared to strategy execution and risk management approach, is several trillion dollars, due to loss of business growth opportunities.

Virtual ecosystem and technology do not need any engagement or motivation to deliver programmed productivity, and cannot go beyond the installed capacity of performance, whereas human beings as capital have immense power to improve and adapt, and thus can grow their performance exponentially.

Paradoxes can be utilised to build a strategy woven around Plan A, B, and C.

The conventional role of the CEO as a Chief Executive Officer to become a spearhead of a Culture of Excellence in the Organisation will be the new CEO paradigm. The CEO will also to take the role of culture execution officer. The key to success will be not being obsessed with top- and bottom-line growth, but building strong, robust middle line of the organization. This will be the key paradigm shift to address all the paradoxes discussed above pertaining to Plan A & Plan B.

Middle-line growth is linked to the CEO’s influence as a role model on the organisation’s purpose, belief, ethos, values-linked behaviors, and way of working, finally appearing in the form of strong culture. The robust middle-line will have huge impact on top and bottom line of the organisation. Middle-line is the soul of a body (organization), having positive influence on the head (top line) and the heart (bottom line). In a technological and highly digitized world, hi-touch will be as essential as hi-tech. The CEO, through Plan C, brings hi-touch in the workplace

The Plan C is a panacea to sustain high performance by building a strong culture. The Plan C offers a systematic way of building a high-performance culture through five stages of culture vision, culture design, culture actions, culture reviews, and culture improvements. Culture in different organisation, teams, and countries is on a different level of culture hierarchy, depending on the rigor of inspired leadership, and effective and efficient implementation of Plan C. Depending on at which level of hierarchy the organization is, its business performance and sustainability in this hugely dynamic and virtual world will be determined.

Written by Dr. Sanjeev Dixit, CHRO – International Business, The Himalaya Drug Company, speaker of 14th HR Minds Forum.