Cube One
“Getting to Cube One” ™
The Cube One Framework is a uniquely empirical approach toward explaining, diagnosing, predicting, and improving organizational performance. It focuses on the frequency of enactment of managerial behaviors (i.e., practices). This in itself is unique. Most theories and prescriptive statements that seek to improve organizational performance invoke espoused/stated policies, mission statements, delineations of core values, or leadership philosophies. Enacted practices, in contrast, are observable phenomena that can be shown to reflect high inter-rater agreement and can be ascertained across organizations and over time.
The Cube One Framework rests on the notion that successful organizations (whether for-profit, nonprofit, or governmental) must simultaneously satisfy the goals of three key stakeholders: (1) sources of funding for the enterprise (e.g., shareholders and investors in the private sector; donors, grant providers, taxpayers in the nonprofit/government sectors), (2) customers who provide revenues that sustain the enterprise, and (3) internal customers (i.e., employees) who facilitate the provision of goods and services. Internal customers seek respectful treatment and fair wages, external customers seek advantageous product/service attributes. And sources of funding are benefitted by improved operating efficiency/productivity.
| Organizational Practices | Example of Strategies | Disciplines & Practices |
| Enterprise-directed | Goal setting, systematic selection and training. | Industrial Psychology, Organizational Behavior, Operations Management, Management Science, Operations Research. And within these fields of study there are numerous techniques that have been examined such as goal setting, incentives, supply chain management, queueing theory. |
| Customer-directed | Measuring customer loyalty and satisfaction, and continuously monitoring and improving the quality of goods/services. | Marketing, Consumer Behavior, Quality Management, Focus groups, Big data, and Net Provider Scores. |
| Employee-directed | Providing two-way communication, minimizing status differentials, and mitigating work/family conflict. | Human Resource Management, Organizational Psychology, and Leadership, Mitigating work/family conflict, Increasing work team cohesion, Enhancing respectful treatment of employees. |
Of course, a multiple stakeholder paradigm is not new, but past multiple stakeholder analyses have been largely theoretical or focused on a singles case study. There have been few metrics that have normative data and permit comparisons across organizations and over time.
The cube One Framework permits classification of the frequency of enactment of the three sets of practices into High, Middle, and Low levels. Organizations that enact High levels of all three sets of practices (H, H, H) are classified in Cube One. Organizations that enact low levels of the three sets of practices (L, L, L) are seen as falling into cube 27. A schematic presentation of this model is provided below. To encourage readers to explore this research further, the following “bottom line” result has emerged from survey research. The rated performance of organizations in Cube One is greater than the performance of organizations in Cube 27 to the extent of 14.2 Sigma. The hallmark of excellence in quality developed by Motorola is the famous 6 Sigma metric, which corresponds to about 3 observations in a million cases (0.000034). In terms of quality control, Six Sigma refers to the likelihood of a defect being three occurrences in a million observations. Fourteen Sigma adds another five zeros and indicates a probability of occurrence due to chance alone of about one in 50 billion.
Abundant validity evidence has been obtained from five survey research studies conducted in four countries, longitudinal cross-lagged panel analysis of financial metrics using Fortune’s list of America’s most admired companies, and eight case studies of prominent organizations (including, Google, Zappos, Four Seasons, and the Mayo Clinic.
A somewhat surprising finding is that validity evidence for the Cube One Framework is slightly stronger among nonprofit/governmental organizations than among for-profit companies. A complete description of the Cube One Framework is provided in the text Improving Organizational Performance: The Cube One Framework published in 2020 by Routledge.
The reader is urged to read more, including the history of the Cube One Framework, validity evidence, a recent article that summarizes research on the Cube One Framework, and a link to several articles.