Patterns of High Performance: Discovering the Ways People Work Best

Managers and business consultants are forever forming theories about what makes people work better. Fletcher, a California-based consultant who eschews any particular ``it'' because individuals are different, interviewed people ``about times when they had experienced doing something extraordinarly well.'' Using this data, he here breaks down the ``consistent and unique sequence of specific actions'' an individual follows ``when achieving his or her personal best.'' Fletcher presents his techniques along with case studies analyzing characteristics of effective managers, organizational realities, motivators and individual patterns of behavior. Can high performance profiles be developed and utilized by everyone? Fletcher thinks so. But the fact that his procedures rely on the cooperation of participants and have no quality control mechanisms to ensure consistency makes this is an interesting but underdeveloped study. 10,000 first printing; $20,000 ad/promo. (Oct.)