(Article provided by Organizing Committee of Extracurricular- Lecture Series)

Director of McKinsey Sydney Tom Saar, visited Tsinghua SEM onApril 20th, 2007, and gave a lecture to some 100 students on the topic of “High Performance Organization: What it Takes to be Great.” Professor Henry Zhu, Assistant Dean of SEM was present at the session.

In his speech, Mr. Saar first shared with the audience the importance of the topic. He pointed out that organizations nowadays are harder to win or survive, while making changes is also hard. From the aspect of organizational evolution process, it’s time to develop high performance organization. What does a high performance organization look like? Mr. Saar introduced a new McKinsey Model besides the famous 7S. It’s the OPP, organization performance profile, which includes Alignment (Direction, Environment & values), Execution (Accountability, Capability, Motivation, Coordination & control), Renewal (External orientation, Innovation), and Leadership in the center.

Mr. Saar offered some implications of high performance organization for Chinese students: first, set aspiration to build a high performance organization; second, determine which to “import” vs. “build”；third, ccommit to personally become a “globally capable’ leader.

After the speech, Mr. Saar kindly answered questions covering trust in organization and individual career development experience etc..