I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative…
According to D.J. Power‘s “A Brief History of Decision Support Systems“, the first use of the term Decision Support System (DSS) was in a 1971 Sloan Management Review article. Gorry and Scott-Morton argued that existing management information systems focused on structured decisions and recommended that systems for semi-structured and unstructured decisions should be called decision…
While they don’t compare to Savage Chickens, high tech product marketers are apt to use dense prose with a plethora of technical jargon directed at experts. As a result, I’ve asked my team to pay special attention to being “simple and clear” in their communication. As Blaise Pascal allegedly quipped, “I apologize in advance for the…
Since the title of this blog is “manage by walking around,” I thought I’d share a few examples of how I use that philosophy myself. While there is plenty of debate as to whether there is a difference between managing and leading, I describe myself as a leader rather than a manager. By that, I…
As I’m done bashing MBOs (for now), I might as well revisit my long-standing concern with the ubiquitous red/yellow/green traffic light metaphor. While the metaphor is intended as a simple summary of performance (green = good, red = not good), for most business situations three levels of performance are not enough to truly judge results….
One last parting shot on MBOs and the proliferation of goals: Note to all vendors of software packages that support goal tracking (including my employer): It’s only a joke. I do know that there’s value in using technology to solve these problems.
A few of my favorite quotes about performance management: Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. Sun Tzŭ c. 490 BC, Chinese military strategist Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. Peter F. Drucker, American Management Guru The essence of competitiveness…
I’m deep into the annual review cycle and struggling with not-so-SMART objectives for employees that I inherited during the year. The frustration is acute enough that it makes me want to channel Deming and eliminate management by objectives. For those who may not remember, Deming is best known for his work in the 1950’s during which he…
As I have in previous years, I had planned to catalog 2009 predictions for the BI and performance management markets to get a sense of how the general consensus might be changing. The new year is nearly a month old and, since I’ve made almost no progress, I was pleased to discover that Timo Elliott beat me to…
“It’s clear that Wilson’s the only person here who reads my blog.” This Paul Wood comic, which appeared in Harvard Business Online, got me thinking again about the nature of manager blogs. As I posted before, if a manager is going to write a blog, the manager should write it themselves. But should the manager’s employees read it?…