BECOME® INSTITUTE
THE RESEARCH
25 YEARS OF RESEARCH INTO WHAT MAKES EXCEPTIONAL ORGANIZATIONS EXCEPTIONAL
For more than 25 years, scientist, author and entrepreneur Eric Bartels has been studying a deceptively simple question:
Why do some organizations achieve results that seem almost impossible — while the overwhelming majority do not?
Not simply why some companies perform better than others. Not which management practices correlate with success. But what fundamentally distinguishes the very small group of organizations that repeatedly create extraordinary value from the way conventional organizations think, organize and act.
The research behind BECOME® began in 2005 and has since included in-depth interviews with almost 700 leaders and the study of approximately 100 organizations from the inside.
These findings were combined with existing international scientific research and with relevant work from psychology, philosophy, organizational science, management theory and behavioral science.
The objective was not to compile another collection of best practices.
It was to discover the underlying logic.
FROM PERFORMANCE TO ULTRAPERFORMANCE
During the research, a striking distinction emerged.
Most organizations operate within broadly comparable assumptions about strategy, management, organization, markets, customers, competition and performance. Some execute these assumptions better than others. They may become highly successful companies.
But a very small group appeared to operate according to a fundamentally different logic.
These organizations did not merely outperform their competitors.
They operated outside the conventional performance curve.
BECOME® calls these organizations Ultraperformers.
Across the companies studied, Ultraperformers have demonstrated the ability to create approximately 750 to 1,500 times enterprise value per product, compared with approximately 1 to 3 times among conventional competitors.
The difference was too large to explain as superior execution of the same business logic.
Something more fundamental was happening.
THE QUESTION CHANGED
This changed the direction of the research.
The question was no longer:
What do successful companies do better?
It became:
What do Ultraperformers do fundamentally differently?
That distinction matters.
Much of traditional management research compares better-performing organizations with less successful ones and identifies practices associated with superior performance.
The BECOME® research took a different approach.
It looked for the underlying patterns shared by organizations whose performance was so exceptional that conventional explanations were insufficient.
The research examined how these organizations think about identity, purpose, strategy, innovation, leadership, responsibility, organization, decision-making and execution.
Again and again, the same deeper pattern appeared.
Ultraperformance was not the result of one exceptional practice.
It was the consequence of an entirely different organizational logic.
TWO FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT LOGICS
The research ultimately revealed two opposing ways in which organizations can operate.
THE MAKE ONTOLOGY
The dominant organizational logic of the Industrial Age is outside-in.
The organization observes the external world — markets, competitors, customer demand, technological developments, economic conditions and opportunities — and determines what it should do in response.
It asks:
What can we make of the world as it is?
BECOME® calls this the MAKE Ontology.
It is the logic underlying the overwhelming majority of organizations and much of conventional management thinking.
THE BECOME® ONTOLOGY
Ultraperformers reverse this logic.
They begin inside.
With identity. Conviction. Purpose. An internally generated conception of what should exist.
They do not primarily ask what the existing world allows them to become.
They determine what they intend to become — and organize the world around that intention.
Their logic is inside-out.
BECOME® calls this the BECOME® Ontology.
This distinction became the central discovery underlying the research.
FROM OBSERVATION TO MODEL
Discovering the difference was not enough.
If Ultraperformance depended only on extraordinary founders, unique personalities or historical circumstances, the findings would be interesting but of limited practical value.
The next question therefore became:
Can the underlying logic of Ultraperformers be modeled?
The research indicates that it can.
Recurring patterns were identified, compared and organized into a coherent architecture. These patterns were subsequently developed into the BECOME® Framework: a model of the business logic and organizational architecture found in Ultraperformers.
The Framework connects four fundamental levels:
Identity → Strategy → Tactics → Operations
It describes how an organization can move from who it fundamentally is, through what it intends to create, to the way responsibility, authority, accountability, decisions and everyday activity are organized.
The result is not a collection of management techniques.
It is an integrated organizational architecture.
FROM MODEL TO IMPLEMENTATION
A scientific model becomes valuable to organizations when it can be applied.
The research therefore continued beyond observation and modeling into implementation.
The BECOME® Framework has been translated into a structured change methodology: the BECOME® Program. It can also be studied directly at BECOME® Academy.
The Program enables organizations to examine their existing logic, define their identity and intended future, translate that into strategy and organizational architecture, and align everyday execution with it.
This is where research becomes practice.
And where the study of Ultraperformance becomes the activation of Ultraperformance.
THE RESEARCH CONTINUES
BECOME® is not presented as a finished management doctrine.
The research continues.
Organizations change. Technology changes. Society changes. The economic environment changes.
But the central research question remains the same:
What enables human beings and organizations to create from who they are and what they believe should exist — rather than merely react to the world around them?
More than 25 years of research has produced a coherent answer to that question, described in The Fifteen Steps of the BECOME® Ontology.
We call it BECOME®.
The Science of Ultraperformance.