IN DEPTH
THE RESEARCH AND THINKING BEHIND BECOME®.
The Introduction and Overview present the central findings of our research and introduce the BECOME® Methodology. Here, we explore their foundations and implications in greater depth.
As a scientific research institute, we use this website both to introduce our work and services and to share our scientific thinking, ongoing research and the knowledge it produces.
The following sections examine how we study leaders and organizations, what our findings reveal, and how those insights translate into a fundamentally different business mindset, logic and architecture. They explain what changes in Strategy, Tactics and daily Operations, why recurring business problems arise, and how organizations can actualize their intrinsic potential as value for the world and themselves.
THE RESEARCH
Our research investigates how leaders think, behave and work, and how this shapes the enterprises they lead. Understanding that relationship requires us to explore both the organization and the person behind the leadership role.
The investigation begins with two three-hour interviews with the leader. These conversations extend beyond business decisions, performance and organizational questions into personal experience, motivations and beliefs. We seek to understand the person, including the assumptions and conditioning that influence how they perceive the world and act within it.
The leader also completes two online psychological assessments developed by BECOME® in collaboration with psychologists. These combine written questions with images. Participants select images without knowing what those choices are intended to reveal. The visual component helps us explore aspects of their intrinsic personality that may remain unexpressed in verbal answers.
A three-hour discussion of the assessments brings the leader together with Eric Bartels and a psychological specialist. The combination of interviews, written responses, imagery and psychological exploration reveals insights that business questions or text-based assessments alone would leave undiscovered.
In many cases, we also accompany the leader during their daily work, observing their behavior, interactions and decisions over several days or, sometimes, several weeks. This allows us to connect what leaders describe with what happens in their working lives.
Some investigations extend into an in-depth study of the enterprise itself. We interview a broad group of managers, often using psychological assessments again, and examine how the organization thinks, operates and makes decisions. We bring these findings together into an analysis of its mindset, behavior, business logic and architecture in the context of intrinsic and extrinsic ways of thinking and working.
Central to this research is the distinction between the conditioned “I” and the intrinsic “self.” We understand the “I” as the identity people construct through family influences, social expectations and wider cultural conditioning. The “self” is the person’s intrinsic identity, underlying that acquired construction. Our psychological expertise enables us to explore this distinction deeply and understand how each finds expression in leadership and organizational life.
This depth of inquiry is fundamental to our work. It connects personal psychology with the everyday reality of leadership and the enterprise, helping us understand what drives the behavior we observe.
We share the knowledge and insights that emerge from this research while protecting the confidentiality of the participating leaders and their organizations.
BECOME® INSTITUTE
ULTRAPERFORMANCE
Ultraperformance is the generation of 750 to 1,500 times as much enterprise value per product or service as the next-best extrinsic competitor.
It is not a metaphor for exceptional performance. It is the name BECOME® gives to an extraordinary difference in value creation identified through more than twenty-five years of interdisciplinary research into leaders and their organizations. The comparison is based on financial analysis of enterprise value per product or service across the companies studied. Explore the research behind ultraperformance.
The magnitude of that difference is remarkable. But the most important finding of the research is not how much more value ultraperformers create.
It is why they create it.
Ultraperformers do not achieve these results by doing what conventional companies do, only better. They think, work and organize from a fundamentally different starting point. Rather than allowing markets, competitors, revenue targets, growth ambitions or other external objectives to determine what they should become, they build their business from the inside out — from their intrinsic identity and the unique value they exist to bring to the world.
BECOME® has modeled this fundamentally different way of doing business in the BECOME® Framework: an integrated business logic and architecture in which Identity, Strategy, Tactics and Operations form one coherent whole.
That is the architecture behind ultraperformance.
ULTRAPERFORMANCE IS NOT HIGH PERFORMANCE
High performance is an established field of organizational research and management practice. Definitions differ, but high-performance organizations are generally understood as organizations that achieve results superior to those of comparable organizations over a sustained period.
Ultraperformance describes something else.
The distinction is not simply that an ultraperformer scores higher on the same performance scale. The research behind BECOME® indicates that ultraperformers operate according to a fundamentally different business logic.
A conventional company can become exceptionally good at understanding its market, responding to customers, outperforming competitors, setting ambitious targets, improving processes and executing its strategy. It can become a high-performing organization while remaining fundamentally outside-in: the external world continues to determine what the organization believes it needs to become.
Ultraperformers reverse that logic.
They begin with who they intrinsically are and the unique value they can bring to the world. From that identity they determine what they intend to become, how they will create that future, how the organization must operate to make it real, and how people think, decide, collaborate and act every day.
The difference is therefore not simply more performance.
It is a different source of performance.
GOOD-TO-HIGH PERFORMANCE VERSUS ULTRAPERFORMANCE
| Dimension | GOOD-TO-HIGH PERFORMANCE | ULTRAPERFORMANCE |
|---|---|---|
| Starting point | Primarily external performance requirements and competitive context | The intrinsic identity of the enterprise |
| Primary orientation | Performing exceptionally well relative to peers and objectives | Creating the unique value that follows from who the enterprise intrinsically is |
| Logic | Predominantly outside-in | Inside-out |
| Strategy | Nonexistent. These companies think and operate tactically and reactively. What they call “strategy” is not a strategy at all, but a set of tactics shaped by market conditions, competition, opportunities, and performance objectives. | Always present. These enterprises think and operate intrinsically and strategically. Their strategy is developed directly from the intrinsic identity of the enterprise. |
| Architecture | Although management invariably denies it, these companies have a tactical, reactive business logic and architecture that continually responds to market conditions. They have no DNA compass and no strategy derived from it. At most, they have a generic statement labelled “purpose” that does not express a true intrinsic purpose. Even this statement is almost always reactive. | These enterprises have a fundamentally different business logic and architecture. It begins with a deeply rooted DNA, discovered and experienced in three dimensions. This DNA continuously guides the behavior of the entire organization because everyone intrinsically feels and identifies with it. The architecture integrates four layers: Identity, Strategy, Tactics, and Operations. Identity articulates the enterprise’s DNA, from which its strategy is directly derived. Tactics translate that strategy into action and therefore differ fundamentally from those of conventional high performers. Daily operations bring this same logic into everyday practice through autonomy, intrinsic competencies, and relationships based on equality throughout the organization. |
| Financial performance | An explicit organizational objective and performance measure. Financial performance is the primary and ultimate goal of the business, an entirely extrinsic objective. Products, employees, and everything else serve as means to that end. The business is driven entirely by money, although a polished tagline almost always suggests otherwise. | A consequence of exceptional value creation. The enterprise’s explicit objective is to create and deliver exceptional value through its products and services. This intrinsic ambition drives everyone in the organization. The resulting products and services are superior to those of competitors, attract greater customer demand, and consequently generate ultraperformance in revenue and profit. |
| BECOME® research range | Among conventional competitors, enterprise value per product or service typically ranges from 1 to 5, with the strongest generating approximately five times as much as the weakest. | Ultraperformers generate 750–1,500 times as much enterprise value per product or service as the next-best extrinsic competitor. |
Why this difference?
Extensive scientific research by our co-founder Eric Bartels, as well as numerous other scientific studies, shows that good-to-high performers all operate according to the laws and resulting conditioning of the Industrial Age, which arose from the Western Enlightenment. Within this worldview, religion and belief in God belong to the private sphere, while public life is organized around logic, reason, and scientific laws. Nature has no intrinsic purpose. Direction in the universe and in life is understood as accidental unless human will deliberately gives it direction.
Applied to business, this produces a particular understanding of an organization: an entity created by human intention that can be shaped into whatever its owners and managers want it to be, primarily to maximize financial returns. We call this the MAKE mindset and way of thinking and working. It is the industrial conditioning through which we have learned to understand and organize the world.
For the past twenty-five years, however, the world has been undergoing another major societal transformation called Telogeny. The term combines the ancient Greek telos, meaning “goal” or “purpose,” and genesis, meaning “coming into being.” Together, these express the realization of intrinsic potentiality.
Telogeny draws on insights from quantum physics, philosophy, neuroscience, and psychology to articulate a fundamentally different understanding of reality. Its central proposition is that direction and developmental potential exist within the universe and within life, independently of human will. Human intention does not have to invent that direction. It can discover it and create the conditions for its actualization.
Consider an acorn. Given the conditions it needs, it develops into an oak tree. Nobody has to decide that it should become an oak or impose the architecture of an oak upon it. The potential and biological organization for that development already exist within the acorn. Its growth expresses an intrinsic direction that does not depend on human intention.
The history of the universe provides a broader perspective. Approximately 13.8 billion years ago, all matter, energy, galaxies, and even time were compressed into a single, infinitely small, hot, and dense point: a singularity. Then the Big Bang occurred, and that singularity began expanding into time, space, and particles, from which the first matter eventually emerged.
Everything you see around you today, from the screen you are looking at to the calcium in your bones and the iron in your blood, ultimately originated from those first clouds of hydrogen and helium formed by the Big Bang. This means that all life on Earth was already present in potential within the matter that existed immediately after the Big Bang.
Existence and being are therefore not accidental, but part of an intrinsic process from potentiality to actuality. In other words, “self-actualization” in its most existential form. The implication is that life is not “makeable,” as our industrial conditioning tells us, but “becomeable.”
This understanding replaces the industrial assumption that meaningful direction must always be imposed from outside with the recognition that optimal development must emerge from within.
This is the BECOME mindset and way of thinking and working. It represents a fundamentally different conditioning: learning to recognize intrinsic identity and potential, and organizing the conditions through which they can become reality.
Our research identifies this mindset across the ultraperformers we have studied. They build their enterprises from the inside out, allowing their intrinsic identity to guide their strategy, tactics, and daily operations. Their distinctive business logic and architecture express a fundamentally different understanding of what an enterprise is and how it develops.
Within the scope of our research, Steve Jobs and Apple, which was founded in 1976, represent the first modern entrepreneurial example we have identified of this BECOME mindset being fully expressed in business. That underlying logic is foundational to Apple’s extraordinary value creation. In August 2018, Apple became the first publicly traded US company to reach a market capitalization of $1 trillion.
The transition from conventional performance to ultraperformance therefore begins with a transformation in thinking. From that different starting point, the enterprise develops a coherent business logic and architecture through which its intrinsic identity becomes exceptional value for the world.
This does not make high performance wrong. Nor does it mean that every organization described as high-performing operates identically.
It means that ultraperformance is not another name for high performance.
It describes a different phenomenon.
MAKE AND BECOME: TWO DIFFERENT BUSINESS LOGICS
THE LIMITS OF OPTIMIZING THE EXISTING SYSTEM
Problems with strategy, execution, leadership, culture, collaboration, and employee ownership are usually treated as separate issues. Yet these problems are connected through the underlying business logic and architecture of the enterprise. When that foundation is flawed, the effects appear throughout the organization.
The visible problems are symptoms of the underlying system.
A building makes this easy to understand. Cracks appear in different walls, but repairing each crack separately does not resolve a failing foundation. The same applies to an enterprise. Even a profitable, apparently successful business can have structural weaknesses that repeatedly generate problems and limit its potential.
Most approaches to improving organizational performance nevertheless begin with the organization as it currently exists. A new strategy is developed. Processes are improved. Structures are redesigned. Leadership is strengthened. Culture is addressed. Employees are asked to take greater ownership.
Each intervention may be valuable. But they usually share an assumption: the underlying business logic and architecture remain fundamentally valid.
BECOME® research into ultraperformers led to a different conclusion. If the underlying logic is outside-in, optimizing individual elements does not transform it into an inside-out system. The foundation continues to generate the problems that the interventions are intended to resolve.
A purpose statement cannot change that foundation by itself. Neither can a new strategy, organizational structure, leadership program, culture program, or operating model.
The enterprise’s business logic and architecture must become coherent from their origin.
Identity, Strategy, Tactics, and Operations must develop as one integrated whole, rooted in the enterprise’s intrinsic identity. Addressing that foundation changes the system that produces the symptoms.
This is the transition from optimization to business transformation.
It begins with Identity.
THE BECOME® FRAMEWORK
The BECOME® Framework maps the intrinsic business logic and architecture found in ultraperformers as four inseparably connected architectural layers:
Identity → Strategy → Tactics → Operations
They are not four conventional management subjects placed next to each other.
Each layer follows logically from the one before it.
IDENTITY
The starting point is the intrinsic identity of the enterprise: its Intrinsic DNA and Purpose.
This is not a mission statement, a collection of corporate values or a communications exercise. It establishes what the enterprise intrinsically is and the unique value it can bring to the world.
Identity becomes the timeless compass for everything that follows.
STRATEGY
Within BECOME®, Strategy is not primarily a response to market forecasts, competitive moves or externally imposed growth targets.
Strategy establishes the business model the enterprise intends to have created within approximately three to five years as the logical expression of its Identity.
The question changes from What should we do given what is happening around us? to What must we create because of who we are?
TACTICS
Strategy alone does not create reality.
The third architectural layer determines the unique Tactics required to realize the chosen Strategy: the targets, approaches, indicators and initiatives through which the future business model is brought into existence.
Tactics therefore does not sit separately from Strategy. It follows from it.
OPERATIONS
The final layer brings the new logic into the everyday reality of the enterprise.
Responsibilities, authority, accountability, decision-making, collaboration, behavior and operational routines must all support what the organization has decided to become.
Otherwise the new Identity, Strategy and Tactics are forced back into the old way of working.
Ultraperformance therefore cannot be created by changing only what an organization wants to achieve.
The organization must change how it thinks and works.
THE PARADOX OF ULTRAPERFORMANCE
One of the most striking characteristics of the ultraperformers studied by BECOME® is that their primary motivation is to create exceptional value for the world. Their extraordinary financial performance follows from that contribution.
They are driven by what they believe should exist in the world and by the unique contribution they are capable of making.
Apple provides a particularly visible illustration. The extraordinary enterprise value created by the company was achieved with a remarkably concentrated physical product portfolio. The logic was not simply to produce more products in order to generate more revenue. The organization became known for an intense focus on creating products it believed should exist.
The financial consequence was extraordinary value creation.
This distinction is fundamental to BECOME®:
Ultraperformers do not create exceptional value because exceptional enterprise value is their reason for being. Exceptional enterprise value emerges because they create exceptional value for the world.
That reverses the conventional performance equation.
CAN ULTRAPERFORMANCE BE MEASURED?
Ultraperformance is measured through enterprise value per product or service and enterprise value per employee.
BECOME® research identifies extraordinary differences on both measures:
- Enterprise value per product or service: ultraperformers generate 750–1,500 times as much as the next-best extrinsic competitor. Among conventional competitors, the difference between the weakest and strongest is approximately 1 to 5.
- Enterprise value per employee: ultraperformers generate 7–12 times as much as the next-best extrinsic competitor. Among conventional competitors, the corresponding range is approximately 1 to 1.7.
The research also examined the mindset, business logic and organizational architecture behind these results. All the ultraperformers studied operate from a fundamentally different starting point: the intrinsic DNA of the enterprise. That DNA determines how they develop strategy, establish tactics, organize work and make decisions throughout the organization.
Identity provides the intrinsic foundation. The enterprise’s DNA is discovered, understood and experienced throughout the organization. It guides what the business exists to contribute, what it develops and how its people think and work. Its influence extends into everyday decisions and behavior.
Strategy is approximately 80% DNA-driven and 20% informed by the outside world. Ultraperformers develop their strategy primarily from their intrinsic identity, while taking account of the world around them and how they expect it to develop. The conventional companies studied operate differently. What they call strategy is, in practice, tactics: a response to markets, competitors, opportunities and financial objectives. Their approach is 100% reactive. Although they may claim to work from a DNA, the research shows that this DNA does not actually determine their direction.
Tactics follow a fundamentally different logic as well. In ultraperformers, approximately 50% of tactical direction comes from their DNA and strategy, and 50% from responding to external circumstances. Their goals, approaches and initiatives translate an intrinsic strategy into reality while responding to what happens around them. This differs fundamentally from the entirely reactive tactics of conventional competitors.
Daily operations express the same intrinsic logic. Employees throughout the enterprise think and work from the inside out. They have substantially greater autonomy and work entirely from their natural talents. Responsibility and decision-making follow those talents and the contribution each person can make. Collaboration rests on equal standing, with power and status playing no role in determining whose contribution matters.
These characteristics form one integrated business logic and architecture. DNA, strategy, tactics, autonomy, natural talents and equal collaboration reinforce one another throughout the enterprise. The distinction extends into how people understand their work, exercise authority, take responsibility and relate to each other.
BECOME® measures the resulting ultraperformance through enterprise value per product or service and per employee. Its research identifies the fundamentally different way of thinking, organizing and working behind those outcomes.
An overview of the research underlying the BECOME® ultraperformance findings is presented below.
THE RESEARCH BEHIND ULTRAPERFORMANCE
For more than twenty-five years, our co-founder Eric Bartels has conducted ongoing interdisciplinary research into the behavior of leaders, the enterprises they build and the value those enterprises create. His original research includes in-depth interviews with 700 CEOs, psychological assessments and the study of 100 enterprises from within over extended periods. Alongside this original research, 1,000 scientific studies have been examined in depth, spanning business and management, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, physics and cosmology.
The investigation examined both the differences in enterprise value creation and the underlying ways in which these organizations think, work and organize themselves. It identified a fundamentally different mindset, business logic and architecture among the ultraperformers studied. These findings form the research foundation of the BECOME® Methodology.
Eric Bartels explores these findings and their wider implications in his books, which also include references to a selection of the scientific literature studied. The research continues, further developing our understanding of how enterprises actualize their intrinsic potential.
HOW AN ORGANIZATION BECOMES AN ULTRAPERFORMER
Becoming an ultraperformer requires a transformation of the way an enterprise thinks, works and organizes itself.
Scientific research shows that 95% of all enterprises worldwide operate within the conditioning of the Industrial Age. Their thinking is dualistic: they divide the organization into separate parts and attempt to improve each part independently. Their business logic is outside-in, driven by markets, competition, opportunities and financial objectives.
Within that logic, business revolves around tactics and execution. What is called “purpose” functions as a tactical slogan. What is called “strategy” is a reactive tactical plan. Neither provides the intrinsic origin from which the enterprise develops as a coherent whole.
The transition to ultraperformance therefore requires more than new terminology, a purpose statement or another organizational redesign. It requires a transformation of that underlying conditioning and the business logic, architecture and behavior it produces.
The BECOME® mindset and way of thinking and working are systemic and holistic. The enterprise develops from its intrinsic origin, with its direction, decisions, relationships and daily activities expressing one coherent logic.
To enable this transformation, we have developed and continually refined the BECOME® Program, based on more than twenty-five years of scientific research by our co-founder Eric Bartels. The Program brings the transformation of business logic, organizational architecture and human behavior together in one integrated, continuous process.
Through this process, the enterprise discovers its Intrinsic DNA and the Identity it reveals. That discovered Identity becomes the compass for the entire enterprise. It finds expression in a corresponding Strategy: the business model through which the enterprise intends to actualize its intrinsic potential.
This Strategy gives direction to fundamentally different Tactics. Conventional tactics are entirely reactive, responding to markets, competition, opportunities and performance objectives. Within BECOME®, Tactics connect the enterprise’s DNA-driven Strategy with external conditions. Their direction comes approximately equally from the intrinsic DNA and Strategy and from the external circumstances in which that Strategy must become reality.
Daily Operations are equally different. People think, decide and act from the enterprise’s intrinsic DNA, with autonomy, the full use of their natural talents and intrinsic collaboration. Coordination emerges through a shared understanding of what the enterprise exists to bring into the world and how each person contributes. Power and status give way to substantive contribution and collaboration between equals.
The familiar words Tactics and Operations therefore describe a fundamentally different organizational reality within BECOME®. Together with Identity and Strategy, they form one integrated business logic and architecture, expressed in how the entire enterprise thinks, works and develops.
Throughout this process, people learn to recognize and transform their industrial, outside-in conditioning. The architecture and the intrinsic, inside-out way of thinking and working develop together.
This transformation requires a specialist in the BECOME® Methodology who also understands human behavior and conditioning and has the practical change management expertise to guide the process. That specialist is a BECOME® Practitioner.
A representative Leadership Coalition, consisting of formal and informal leaders from across the enterprise, owns and leads the transformation from within. The BECOME® Practitioner facilitates and structures the process, challenges established assumptions, connects insights and deepens understanding. Ownership and responsibility remain with the enterprise.
The outcome is an enterprise whose discovered Intrinsic DNA is expressed coherently in its Identity, Strategy, Tactics and daily Operations, and whose people have developed the understanding, capability and autonomy to continually actualize that potential.
For more information: WHAT A BECOME® PROGRAM IS
WHO IS ULTRAPERFORMANCE FOR?
Ultraperformance is relevant to enterprises that want to move beyond an ongoing succession of separate interventions and transform the underlying business logic that makes those interventions necessary.
A leadership problem leads to a leadership program. A culture problem leads to a culture program. Problems with coordination lead to a reorganization or new software. Other issues are assigned to internal teams, interim managers or external consultancies.
Each problem receives its own solution. Yet the underlying business logic and architecture connecting those problems remain unchanged. The enterprise continues to invest time, money and attention in addressing different manifestations of the same underlying reality.
BECOME® is for enterprises whose leaders recognize that their next stage of development requires a different approach.
They may be experiencing growing complexity, recurring problems or a widening gap between strategy, structure and daily behavior. A new generation of leadership may be taking responsibility. They may have lost clarity about what makes their enterprise uniquely valuable. Or they may already be successful while recognizing that their intrinsic potential extends far beyond what their current way of thinking and working allows.
The choice is fundamental: continue addressing problems separately, or transform the business mindset, logic and architecture that keep producing them. Our research identifies this intrinsic transformation as removing the shared underlying cause of 98% of recurring business problems, eliminating the need for the consultancy interventions those problems require.
Through the BECOME® Program, the enterprise actualizes the BECOME® Framework and transforms from tactically reactive to intrinsically strategic. Its discovered Intrinsic DNA gives rise to fundamentally different Strategy, Tactics and daily Operations. The organization and its people's mindset and behavior develop together through one continuous process.
By removing the systemic causes that connect these problems, the enterprise frees substantial amounts of time, money and attention previously absorbed by coordination, control, rework and separate interventions. These resources become available for creating value.
At the same time, the enterprise creates exceptional value for the world through its products and services, attracting greater demand. Exceptional value creation and structurally less waste follow from the same intrinsic way of thinking and working. Both contribute to financial ultraperformance.
The starting point is a more fundamental question:
Who is this enterprise, and what becomes possible when everything it does follows from that?
FROM PERFORMANCE TO ULTRAPERFORMANCE
The conventional performance question is:
How can we become better at what we do?
The ultraperformance question is different: what could we become if everything we do were built from who we intrinsically are? That is the transition modeled in the BECOME® Framework and implemented through the BECOME® Program.
Explore how organizations implement the BECOME® business logic and architecture through BECOME® Alliance.