Book SummaryThe Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of The Advantage

Many leaders spend large sums on marketing and technology trying to obtain a competitive advantage for their business. However, Patrick Lencioni explains that the biggest advantage they can gain is actually free and already within their reach: organizational health. Without organizational health, even the savviest industry leaders will find themselves failing to reach their full potential. In The Advantage, Lencioni lays out a straightforward plan to establish organizational health so that your company quickly becomes a powerhouse in its industry.

Lencioni is a consultant who specializes in executive team management and organizational health. He’s also the author of numerous books on business and team management, including The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Death by Meeting, and The Ideal Team Player. Lencioni began working in management and organizational health after realizing that struggling corporate leaders were wasting their time on things like strategy, finance, and marketing when their real problem was poor management. Since then, he’s dedicated himself to presenting a straightforward and actionable way for organizations to improve their management, cohesiveness, and efficiency—in other words, their organizational health.

This guide will define organizational health and lay out...

The Advantage Summary What Is Organizational Health and Why Is It Important?

Lencioni’s definition of organizational health encompasses two main factors. First, the organization’s goals and standards are clear, consistent, and regularly communicated to everyone in the organization. Second, individuals and groups align with the organization’s standards and are dedicated to the organization’s goals. Factor one is necessary for factor two to exist. When organizations implement these two factors of organizational health, Lencioni says they’ll be highly effective.

(Shortform note: Lencioni’s concept of organizational health (OH) isn’t new—the McKinsey group, a global management consulting firm, [claims to have invented the concept roughly five years before The...

The Advantage Summary Step #1: Create a Unified and Effective Leadership Team

Lencioni explains that organizational health starts at the top, so you must begin by creating a unified and efficient leadership team. This team should ideally be composed of three to nine individuals who’ll share responsibility for establishing and achieving organizational goals. Each of these individuals should represent a crucial part of the organization or provide a unique, valuable perspective to the team. The team should be able to come to collective decisions after meaningful discussions and debates.

(Shortform note: The importance of effective leadership teams and the characteristics they must have—like safety, accountability, and specialized roles—are widely accepted among business experts. However, the ideal size of an effective team has been widely debated and studied for years before and after the publication of The Advantage. In recent years, [experts have generally come to the agreement that smaller is...

The Advantage Summary Step #2: Establish Clear and Consistent Organizational Goals and Standards

Next, Lencioni says that leadership teams must create a company culture with clear and consistent organizational goals and standards. These goals and standards will provide employees with clarity on the organization’s purpose and their role in it and will unify them through shared values and ideals.

To create a company culture with clear and consistent goals and standards, Lencioni says the leadership team must establish four principles: the organization's core purpose, its behavioral values, its strategies for success, and its top priority.

(Shortform note: In The Culture Code, Daniel Coyle similarly emphasizes the importance of a strong company culture with clear and consistent goals and standards. However, rather than the organization’s purpose being one component of a strong organizational culture, he says purpose is the foundation of other cultural elements, like behavioral values, success strategies, and priorities. He elaborates that putting purpose at the core of the organization will increase the energy employees put towards...

The Advantage Summary Step #3: Achieve Employee Alignment and Dedication

For an organization to be healthy, Lencioni says that employees must align with and be dedicated to the organization’s goals and standards—this is vital for organizational unity.

To achieve employee alignment, the organization’s hiring and firing processes must align with its goals and standards. To achieve employee dedication, leaders must constantly and effectively communicate the organization’s goals and standards and their personal dedication to them. Let’s explore each of these processes in more detail.

(Shortform note: To create employee alignment and dedication, Lencioni says goals and standards must be prioritized during hiring and firing and must be constantly communicated to employees. While John Doerr agrees that goals must be transparent, he points out in Measure What Matters that creating organizational goals and standards at the top, as Lencioni recommends, may disrupt employee dedication. When goals and standards are created at the top...

The Advantage Summary Step #4: Maintain Organizational Health With Effective Meetings

Finally, Lencioni explains that you must maintain organizational health by having effective meetings. In these meetings, the organization’s values and success strategies must be used to solve problems, achieve goals, and progress the organization. To be effective, the meetings must have a clear, narrow focus.

Implement Effective Meetings at All Levels of the Organization

While Lencioni emphasizes that the leadership team must have effective meetings to establish organizational health, Ray Dalio points out in Principles: Life and Work that effective meetings need to occur at every level of the organization to maintain productivity. As such, he recommends that all leaders and teams use the following criteria for meetings to keep them effective:

• Clarify the details—who’s running the meeting, what level the meeting is taking place at, and what its (clear and narrow) goal is. For example, it could be an informational meeting or a debate.

• **Determine how many people should be invited and who they...

Shortform Exercise: Identify Your Success Strategies

Lencioni says that to maintain organizational health, you need three primary strategies that your company can use to achieve its core purpose. These strategies will provide your company with guidance when creating short-term goals, areas of improvement, and to-do lists.

Clearly state your organization’s core purpose and brainstorm all the possible ways you can achieve that purpose. (For example, imagine that your purpose is to influence more people to care for the environment. You might be able to achieve this by handing out brochures in public places like universities or train stations, getting popular people like celebrities or influencers to advocate for your cause, petitioning government organizations to change or enforce policies, holding rallies, selling products at popular grocery stores, and so on.)