High Performance Partnership in Egypte

by Dalia Fakhry

Since the January 2011 revolution, Egypt has gone through dramatic political changes that directly impacted the economy.

Business has been massively affected. The characteristics of the market are no longer predictable. Investors stood watching the political incidents and many of them withdrew their investments away until conditions stabilize. Many projects suspended, several small to medium organizations closed and many large organizations started to shift towards crisis mode of operation in which they opted for cost reduction through laying off employees, closing unprofitable accounts or cutting down expenses in general.

All of the above changes hit organizations of the public and private sectors and left them fragile and unable to cope with the changes.

The government realizes that the economy needs a fast boost. Short and long term actions should be taken to recover the losses. Economists say that fast recovery can only be achieved if private sector organizations become the main source of growth. But how can organizations stand strong amid all this instability?

There is no time for trial and error. History of organizational performance discussed loads of factors that might be important for improving organizational performance, however correct and well validated factors for improving performance is what is needed currently for the Egyptian economy to grow.

The HPO and HPP (High Performance Partnership) frameworks created by Dr. De Waal seem to present empirically validated factors that have been tested before on growing economies and many industries. When an organization reaches an HPO status, this reflects on its profitability, return on assets, return on equity, return on investment, return on sales and on total shareholders return.

The HPO framework emphasizes the importance of quality of management as a factor of improving organizational performance. Managers will drive business decisions therefore their strength, integrity and people orientation are very important for the success of a firm that needs to grow and sustain. Having high quality employees as well will matter. Employees drive implementations, and without their commitment, no organization can grow. There is no room for centralization of decisions. Everyone in the organization must take part in open communication to grow. Focus on continuous improvement should be adopted by all organization layers. And although short quick steps should be taken to grow the organizations, long term orientation should be adopted to preserve strategic partners, and be able to stand competition.

Additionally, healthy collaboration between partners is very well needed at this stage of the Egyptian economy as there is no room for wasted efforts and financial losses resulting from improper communication or misunderstanding of expectations between partners. The HPP framework defined by De Waal proposes the following factors as essential aspects in a successful partnership: control, trust, involvement, coordination, dependence, communication, conflict handling, and diversity.

For this reason, I decided to conduct a research to investigate the factors influencing the successful transition of Egyptian ICT organizations to high performance organizations and high performance partners. Personally I believe that at this stage of the economic crisis, strong and well validated frameworks like the HPO and High Performance Partnership would fairly reflect the status of Egyptian organizations and would help in identifying the improvements needed to be adopted by organizations to scale towards high performance. The HPO and High Performance Partnership can provide direction and guide management towards setting proper priorities based on gaps identified between current and desired statuses. The frameworks will also help management in identifying short term immediate improvements that if adopted would quickly reflect on the organizational performance at this critical stage of the economic crisis.