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?…
Tomorrow I will see a close friend and former boss who taught me a lot about business. One of the things he taught me was that actions speak louder that words. Rule #1: Do something. People like to use the phrases ‘walk the walk’ and ‘leading by the example‘ but don’t provide any details on what it…
This is my 100th post! I realize that it may seem a bit hypocritical for me to be celebrating a milestone based on an activity metric, rather than an outcome one. As I pointed out in a post trying to define the mission and objectives for this blog, the quality of the posts is much…