The question
Scientist, author and serial entrepreneur Eric Bartels set out to understand a pattern that conventional management explanations did not account for: why a small number of leaders and organizations create disproportionate value, again and again, while most enterprises work hard within a far narrower band of results. Rather than studying what those organizations do, his research examined how they think — the logic underneath their choices, their business models and the way they organize themselves. Exceptional enterprises have been studied from within, and those findings have been combined with international scientific research and the work of leading psychologists, philosophers and management thinkers. The ideas and findings have been developed across a series of books.
A quarter century of ongoing research
Eric Bartels’ research spans more than a quarter of a century and continues today. It has included interviews with 700 CEOs and other business leaders, alongside long-term, in-depth study of 100 companies from within.
These firsthand findings have been combined with the available international scientific literature on the behaviour of leaders and enterprises. The resulting ideas and findings have been developed across a series of books.
Inside-out thinking
The central finding is that these enterprises think from the inside out. They do not begin with the market, with competitors, with revenue or with growth targets and then reason backwards to what they should be. They begin with what they intrinsically are and what they are able to contribute, and they build everything else as an expression of that. Outside-in thinking produces organizations that chase positions. Inside-out thinking produces organizations that create value the market has not asked for yet — and that is where the extraordinary differences in performance originate.
Why identity and purpose come first
An authentic purpose is never a separately formulated purpose statement. It emerges from the DNA, and therefore from the intrinsic identity, of the enterprise. That is why the first phase of a BECOME® Program finds, establishes and articulates that identity rather than beginning with strategy. Once an enterprise genuinely works from the inside out, familiar concepts — strategy, business model, tactics, execution — take on a different meaning and are built from a different logic. Each layer follows from the one before it: strategy from identity, tactics from strategy, and the operational way of working from tactics.
Ontology, Framework, Program
These three terms describe three stages of the same body of work. The BECOME® Ontology is the explanation: what this way of thinking is and why it produces what it produces. The BECOME® Framework is the model: the business thinking, business logic and architecture that connect identity, strategy, tactics and operations into one coherent whole. The BECOME® Program is the process: the way an enterprise develops and implements that architecture in its own context, with its own people.
From knowledge to work
Knowledge of this kind changes nothing until people build with it. In a BECOME® Program a representative coalition of an enterprise's formal and informal leaders works through the Framework using the BECOME® Canvases, facilitated by a BECOME® Practitioner. They develop their own identity, strategy, tactics and operational way of working — and the behavioral change that makes the architecture real in daily decisions. The objective is not dependence on consultants, but an enterprise that can keep actualizing its own potential. BECOME Alliance is the organization that brings this work into enterprises, as the exclusive delivery organization of BECOME® Practice.
Examining the work further
The research library, the full explanation of ultraperformance and the books are published by BECOME® Institute. These are the Institute's own research findings and proprietary models. The introductory booklet below is the shortest route into the subject.
