book

Buy the book:

Chock-full of know-how and experience, and written in a style that is both rigorous and refreshingly light on jargon, The Performance Papers is an invaluable handbook for leaders who practise – or aspire to – the art of general management.

Especially Now, How Should You Best Deploy Your Resources?

How do you ensure sustainable performance at a time when the rules seem to have changed, especially if new investment is harder to come by? We improve organizational performance by focusing on helping clients to get more out of their assets and resources. Typically this involves finding ways to see and understand them differently, leading to recombinations that yield value that is trapped waiting to be released.

Often, the challenge is a frustrating inability to bring into play all the expensively-acquired and hard-won know-how, systems, relationships and skills that your organization already possesses but, for whatever reason, can’t apply or reconfigure as circumstances evolve.

The approaches we can bring you are rigorous, yet human, pragmatic and collaborative – our methods are solid, and we can talk to you about them in plain words.

 

What People Say

Many thanks for your excellent help with our strategy review process over the last year. The exercise has significantly strengthened the business.

Mark A Langridge | Managing Director, KMS Insurance Management (subsidiary of Randall & Quilter Plc)

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I have known Andy for many years and as a consultant, coach and mentor he has the rare ability to mix the theory, intellectual rigour and practicality into a real value added offering to the businesses and individuals he works with.

John Handley | Senior Director, Lloyds Development Capital

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Andy Bass is that rare consulting talent who appreciates the synergy between strategic direction and committed support. He sees the job through until the client sees the practical results.

Alan Weiss | Bestselling author of “The Ultimate Consultant” and “The Innovation Formula”

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Many thanks for all your help in thinking about the strategic issues my company and role face. The additional clarity has been invaluable.

Karl Pestell | Head of Market Risk, Centrica Plc

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Andrew has a gift for offering unusual ways to look at issues that make the right decision suddenly seem clear.

James Stevenson | Group Risk and Insurance Manager, SEGRO Plc

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Andy helped to clarify key goals and development plans, and also adapted his approach as particular issues arose. He gave relevant and direct advice which I could apply. I obtained my goals – he delivered.

Ben Thornber | Partner, Martineau

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Andy, I wanted to reiterate my appreciation for the work you have done both with me and with our key managers over the last 18 months. It has made a clear, dramatic difference to our business.

Kathryn Smith | Managing Director, Databuild Ltd

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I first met Andy and Paul when they gave a presentation at the KPMG Birmingham Transaction Services Annual Conference in October 2004. Following the Conference, I arranged one-on-one coaching with Andy. These sessions were even more valuable.

Iain Wright | Senior Manager, KPMG

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Andy has a deep understanding of the cultural issues facing professional service firms. BassClusker’s work with Pinsent Masons over the last three years has been invaluable.

Katie Dignan | Head of Sales Development, Pinsent Masons LLP

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Andy is able to get to the nub of an issue very quickly. What was really worthwhile from the perspective of a practical group of people is that in addition to stimulating ‘out of the box’ discussion we came out having identified and formulated clear strategic objectives.

Jackie McLaughlin | Head of Facilities Europe, DLA Piper LLP

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Snowballing to Success

snowball
No doubt you can recall any number of grand change interventions which achieved slow, disappointing or even counter-productive effects. Template-heavy change management approaches often fall short of their promise. Snowball Projects offer a disciplined alternative that emphasises the use of your own resources to get and build on real results fast, while managing risks by gaining ongoing feedback from the real world. More >

'Dovetail' for Lasting Buy-in

dovetail
As most executives know only too well, getting to a point where all the key people are pulling in the same direction can be tough, and the inability to do this creates a lot of drag. Leadership teams are usually made up of strong personalities with different ideas of what they want to do and how they want to do it (and that's before we get to the unofficial power-brokers and gatekeepers…) More >

Mission-critical changes, fast

domino
A small change, if it's the right one, can have huge results. But much of what we do has only a proportionate, linear effect. In even the most successful executive's career, relatively few actions lead to truly dramatic progress. So imagine if you could systematically increase the number of those actions. More >