Most leaders and performance improvement professionals understand how difficult it can be to get even the simplest behaviors started in your organization, let alone to turn them into lasting winning habits. Fortunately, there’s now an easier way to establish habits at scale. “Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization’s DNA” by Drs. Julie M. Smith and Lori Ludwig is launching on Oct. 31, 2024. Available for pre-order on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, this practical guide is a game-changer for any organization striving to make mission-critical behaviors stick.
Smith and Ludwig, co-founders of Performance Ally headquartered in Fairmont, WV, offer a simple five-step process to transform key behaviors into lasting habits that evolve alongside your organization’s strategies and processes. Backed by science, the book is accompanied by the Behavior Blueprint HUB—an interactive, video-guided toolkit with templates, workshops, advisory support and a masterclass program to help teams achieve breakthrough results at scale. The HUB is an all-in-one, do-it-yourself platform for building and managing Vital Behavior Blueprints to execute any performance improvement effort.
Smith, who hails from Minnesota, came to West Virginia to earn a doctoral degree in West Virginia University’s internationally renowned Behavior Analysis program. While still a student, she had the good fortune of working with a team of faculty, students and consultants at the university’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies and Development to pioneer one of the most powerful and practical behavior-centric business management systems available today.
That success led her to co-found the Continuous Learning Group (CLG) in 1993, which has since become one of the world’s premier consultancies for behavior-based strategy execution. As a result of CLG’s success, Smith was inducted into the West Virginia Business Hall of Fame. She later co-founded Performance Ally with Ludwig. They have brought together a world-class team focused on combining state-of-the-art behavior science with mobile technologies to ensure patients and staff work together to execute Vital Behaviors that lead to better outcomes every time at scale.
“The inconsistency of behavior is a silent killer of business results,” says Dr. Smith, CEO of Performance Ally. “That’s why we developed this book and our Blueprint HUB—to bring our proven strategies to life and help leaders drive real change.”
Dr. Lori Ludwig, chief performance architect at Performance Ally, says, “Our approach has helped thousands of people improve organizational outcomes tenfold. Many organizations are building this process into their business planning cycles to execute their strategies effectively.”
Derek Cortez, Ph.D., CEO of Chileda, says, “Our most recent strategic plan aims to reduce staff injuries leveraging the wisdom of the Vital Behavior Blueprint. The crystal-clear layout of the blueprint provides our team with a map and set of instructions by which we are able to implement the Vital Behaviors to improve safety in our organization. We are implementing our blueprint and are already seeing transformational value.”
Readers will discover the transformative power of Vital Behaviors through real-world success stories, learning how to identify the Vital Behaviors that will propel their organization to unparalleled success when adopted at scale, a groundbreaking five-step process to embed Vital Behaviors as lasting habits with the flexibility to evolve dynamically and effective methods to ensure leaders and team members feel valued every day for doing the actions that matter most.
“Vital Behavior Blueprint: 5 Steps to Embed Mission-Critical Habits into Your Organization’s DNA” is priced at $27.99 on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
Joe Jimenez, former CEO of Novartis and co-founder and managing director of Aditum Bio, says, “One of the most important leadership lessons I learned is that unwanted behavior variability can be a root cause of poor performance and most importantly, with the right tools, we can do something about it. This should be taught in every business school. Luckily, it’s available now in this book.”
