Avisen certainly intrigued me with a post called The Achilles heal (sic) of Performance Management. It’s widely agreed that many performance management projects deliver less value than originally promised. The issue is so endemic that a colleague once asked me “Does performance management have any value?” Imagine my disappointment when, after wading through nearly 1000 words of…
Archive | 2008
Timing of Blogs
One of the advantages of using WordPress for my blog is it has a decent amount of built-in reporting. For example, WordPress ranks entries by the total number of page views since they were first posted. Unfortunately, the built-in reports are limited to last 7 Days, 30 Days, Quarter, Year, and All Time. This means it’s difficult…
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
Measurement Missteps
Although I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I used to, one of my favorite parts of my job is helping organizations avoid measurement missteps. My focus is on strategy articulation, not strategy formulation. While other consultants focus on helping organizations figure out where they should go, I use performance management techniques to make…
Bad KPIs, bad behavior
I received the following email about my Love/Hate Boss post: Your recent comments about relationship between boss styles and KPIs really hit home but in a different context than you described. My boss is currently developing KPIs for me and my team to judge our 2008 performance and he asked me for input. When workers…
The Risk of Spreadsheets
Unless you were trapped on a desert island over the last few months, it’s unlikely that you missed the Société Générale scandal and the resulting teeth-gnashing about the need for stricter controls and oversight in the financial services industry. While I’m all for better access and process controls leading to improved segregation of duties, I…
Love or Fear the Boss
Should you love or fear the boss? In a Harvard Business Review article entitled Love and Fear and the Modern Boss, Scott Snook writes: Five hundred years ago, Niccolò Machiavelli posed the question of whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared, concluding that if you can’t be both (and few…
Predictions, redux
Even though my recent post on BI predictions is still generating higher-than-normal traffic, I assumed that the annual season of prognostication had died down; after all, it’s already Feb. But over on the BI Questions Blog, Timo strays from declaring the death of One Version of the Truth to provide some suggestions that BI/PM vendors…
SMART Objectives
Over at Crossderry, Paul talks about the challenges of choosing SMART objectives for performance evaluations. As he points out, coming up with good objectives isn’t easy and, all too often, managers and employees settle for ones that are innocuous and toothless. I wish the situation were otherwise but in most companies there’s no compelling reasons…
Beyond the core blue ocean strategy
Strategy consultants seem to recommend to go beyond the core blue ocean. Confused? Let me explain. Chris Zook’s book Beyond the Core describes how an organization can continue to grow after its core business has plateaued by finding adjacent opportunities which both leverage and reinforce its core strengths. Zook recommends a series of small, harmonious adjacent moves to maximize long-term…