Archive | 2008

Paying New Employees to Quit

Paying new employees to quit sounds counter-intuitive but it could the key to high-performance organization. In “Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit – And You Should Too,” Bill Taylor explains… When Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People…

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Fourth of July factoids

In case you didn’t see it, the U.S. Census Bureau issued a Facts for Features release (note: destination page has been removed) in observance of The Fourth of July 2008. It’s full of unusual holiday-themed factoids you can share at your picnic. My favorite is that the baked beans you eat likely came from North Dakota; the state produced 42%…

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Holiday week ramblings

Some performance management ramblings to kick off your holiday week: (A) Barry suggests Four Questions To Ask When Building Your First Strategy Map:  What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors? What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage? What are the three most significant gaps or barriers…

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Better Planning and Budgeting

Over at Intelligent Enterprise, an article entitled “How to Get to Better Planning and Budgeting” provides five questions every finance organization should ask: Is the planning and budgeting process as strategic as it could be? Are the budgets as accurate as they should be? Does your planning really help increase your company’s agility? Could your…

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Performance Anxiety

Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership.  How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…

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I beg to differ

There hasn’t been enough debate on this blog recently so I’m hoping this post will stir things up a bit. Over at the other guys, Frank wrote a post titled EPM and Strategy Management that I had to read four or five times to understand. Even now, I’m not completely sure what he’s getting at. My confusion…

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Planning vs. Budgeting

Openly, I get annoyed when people use the term planning to describe budgeting. While the terms planning and budgeting are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing. Budgeting is how you allocate resources (typically financial) to reach specific objectives. Budgeting helps you create an estimate of income and expenses for a specific time period. Budgeting manages money…

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