On Performance

From Strategy to Behavior at Scale

De: Eric Kish

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

This book is the first in a five-part series that explores how organizations can use the exIQtive method (pronounced executive) to build and run scalable organizations. After more than a decade of working with founders, CEOs, and executive teams, I’ve come to believe that Strategy dies in the gap between Intent and Behavior. When this happens, we say the organization is not Scalable. For an organization to be scalable 5 things must happen:

• Readiness – Employees must be capable of performing their responsibilities independently, consistently, and with clarity.

• Engagement – People thrive in environments that meet their behavioral needs, offer a path for growth, and give them real agency over outcomes.

• Fair Reward – Compensation must reflect the actual value an employee brings to the organization—not just tenure or title—and align with what the market pays for that value.

• Alignment with Strategic Intent – Everyone must understand the company’s true priorities and direction, and feel personally invested in the outcome.

• Organizational Flow – The flow of an organization is shaped by its rituals—structured routines that reduce friction, create momentum, and embed a culture of continuous improvement. Disciplined rituals are how you put your company on autopilot, cruising toward strategic goals. They build the muscle memory that enables consistency at scale.

This book, On Performance, focuses on strategic clarity. Without it, companies waste time optimizing silos instead of winning as a system.

I learned this lesson the hard way—over 30 years of scaling six different organizations, serving as CEO, and taking companies from chaos to exit. These were not theory-based case studies. These were real businesses, with real revenue, real people, and real stakes—including one sold for $3.8 billion.

Every time, I faced the same challenge: scaling people as fast as product and market. And every time, I came to the same conclusion—shaping employee behavior to achieve business goals is the difference between success and failure.

That insight became the foundation of the exIQtive methodology, a practical system to turn strategy into behavior at scale. Over the past decade, I’ve delivered my flagship exIQtive workshop more than 200 times, helping CEOs and leadership teams build fast-growing, sustainable organizations. Many of those sessions were hosted by Vistage, the world’s largest CEO peer advisory organization, where I’ve worked with hundreds of leaders under the pressure of rapid growth.

My goal in this book is simple: to give you a clear, practical, and scalable framework for making strategic clarity a living culture—not just a slide in a board deck. When people are truly strategically focused, companies grow faster and scale smarter. And when clarity is paired with readiness, engagement, fair reward, and disciplined rituals—everything changes.

— Eric Kish