James Governor sent me an article called Management by Marching Around which reviews the book “No Yelling: The 9 Secrets of Marine Corps Leadership You Must Know to Win in Business.” While I’m amused by the similarity to the title of my own blog, it got me thinking about military analogies in business. When people invoke military…
I often use a honeycomb as a metaphor for a connected and aligned organization. In Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy, I defined cascading as a formal method for achieving alignment by explicitly connecting strategy to operations to tactics. When cascading works well, every individual understands how his/her objectives supports the corporate objectives. I frequently get asked how…
By now, most of us have read about organizations that attempted to improve their performance by deploying dashboards populated with financial and operational metrics only to discover that managing by numbers alone didn’t improve their performance. Instead, organizations must go beyond keeping score to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of both what they are trying…
As much as I believe in the concept of organizational alignment, I always find it a bit dismaying that so few other people seem to be blogging about it. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on this post from a Deloitte Consulting blog called “Corporate Performance Management – The Next Step”. A primary goal of…
Balanced scorecards should sometimes be imbalanced. Over in the PMA Forum, Alan Meeks suggests the word balance is counterproductive, as it’s impractical to assign equal weight to each of the four perspectives. He argues for a ‘genuinely systemic scorecard’ – not nearly as catchy, is it? As I replied, the original intent of the term balance was…
In my inaugural post, I said “The goal of this blog is to comment on the market for product and services that help organizations achieve alignment and highlight specific cases in which organizations have been successful in increasing their performance by getting people on the same page”. a recent flight, I took some time to…
This week at ASMI’s Balanced Scorecard Masters Conference I gave a talk entitled “Performance Alignment: Cascading Enterprise Strategy Throughout the Organization.” For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of cascading, it’s a formal method for achieving alignment throughout an organization. Cascading isn’t the only possibility: all employee phone calls, status meetings,…
In the traditional depiction of a Balanced Scorecard strategy map, the four perspectives are stacked up on top of each other: learning & growth at the bottom and financial at the top. Sometimes, people think this implies employees are the least important perspective but a better interpretation is that employees are the foundation of a successful…
After my posting on call centers, I received an email from a reader submitting his own recent experience with a call center. The story is so funny – and such a classic example of lack of alignment – that, with the reader’s permission, I decided to share it with you. I edited the email for…
Although she’s too far away to hear me, I want to give a big shout-out to Stacey Barr from Australia who describes herself as a performance measure specialist. In the Performance Measurement Association Discussion Forum, someone named “Eke, U” asks which parameters they should use to measure the performance of a marine terminal gate. I…