Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…
Author Archive | Jonathan Becher
Focused Organizations
As Balanced Scorecard practitioners know, Kaplan and Norton recommend five principles for strategy focused organizations: translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone’s everyday job; make strategy a continual process; and mobilize leadership for change. The City of Charlotte, NC applied these principles to become a Balanced Scorecard…
More Gloom Than Doom
Over at Slate, Zachary Meisel and Jesse Pines have a sensationalist article entitled Waiting Doom that describes how hospitals are killing emergency room patients. They claim Esmin Green’s death was caused by the length of time she waited in the E.R. which they blame on the hospital practice of boarding inpatients. In their words, Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can…
Riskfriends and Key Risk Indicators
I don’t normally promote other peoples’ blogs and instead comment on their posts or add them to my blogroll. However, I stumbled upon the Riskfriends Weblog which is dedicated “for risk professionals or people who just like risks”. Despite a little sleuthing, I haven’t been able to find out anything about the author other than…
Strategy vs. Planning
For several years, I’ve argued that performance management is more than just budgeting. I’ve also pointed out that the term planning was often misused by software vendors whose products were mostly limited to financial planning (aka budgeting), rather than end-to-end resource allocation and management. And finally, I’ve advocated outcome-based budgeting, rather than activity-based budgeting, so…
Analysts on Strategy Management
Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…
Ghost in the blog
Recently, I was talking to this friend of mine (don’t you love stories that start this way?) who told me there’s an edict in her very-large-company that every executive should have an internal blog. The blog would serve as a way of explaining each executive’s departmental priorities, provide visibility to important issues that would benefit…
Measuring Virtual Events
Partially due to corporate sustainability reasons and partly due to old-fashioned cost savings, I’ve been thinking a lot about virtual events lately. The idea behind virtual events is pretty simple – rather than flying thousands of people to a single destination to discuss a series of topics, you have these discussions on-line. While simple in…
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…
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%…