A year after blogging that Halloween metrics can be scary, there is some good news from the National Retail Federation. The NRF reports that American consumers will spend an average of $66.28 on Halloween in 2010, up from last year’s $56.31 and about the same as 2007 and 2008. Even though Halloween didn’t become a commercial…
“Which blogs are the most popular?” It’s a question I’ve started hearing again lately, especially as many of my work colleagues have begun experimenting with social media. This is an unanswerable measurement question, just like for analyst relations or marine terminal gates. To try to answer the question, many people cite Technorati’s Top Blogs (original link…
Speedlinking on management styles and 2010 predictions: New research from The Work Foundation suggests that outstanding performance comes from people-centric leadership rather than target-driven, micro-management. The authors observe that “outstanding leaders are focused on performance but they see people as the means of achieving great performance and themselves as enablers. They don’t seek out the limelight for…
I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions as the once-per-year goal settings usually come with unrealistic targets. Without reasonable goals, resolutions take a back seat to day-to-day realities. In fact, a recent Marist poll shows half of Americans make resolutions but only about 1/3 of those who do keep them for longer…
Despite the fact that only two of my readers have pointed it out, it’s painfully obvious to me that I haven’t posted in two weeks. While two weeks isn’t very long, I pride myself on posting weekly and commited to measuring frequency of posting just a few months ago. The few days off I took for Thanksgiving…
After last week’s post, Scrum By Walking Around, a reader emailed to ask if I knew the the origins of the phrase management by walking around (MBWA). Rather than replying immediately based on what I believed, I spent a fair amount of time doing Web research but the results were inconclusive. Most sources credit the Hewlett-Packard culture for…
Throwing down the blogging gauntlet, Michael asks a simple – but provocative – question: How would […] you define Performance Management and what does it mean when it is successfully implemented? My initial reaction was to borrow a phrase from Justice Potter Stewart: I’m not sure I can define performance management, but I know it when I…
For those of you who remember the series of posts two years ago defining objectives for this blog, you’ll recall that I decided that average number of comments per post and number of unique visitors per month were better measures of my success than number of page views or frequency of posts. Regardless, I was…
At the end of every month, I review my most popular posts from the last 90 days. In Q2 Dilbert on Risk Management showed up in the top 5 for the first time:The surge in popularity is interesting but I’m not sure that it’s reliable, especially since Google Trends doesn’t show the same pattern. Regardless, risk…
In a short, but insightful, piece called ‘What’s Missing from Your Scorecard?’ Mark Graham Brown suggests eight categories of metrics which should be better represented on a balanced scorecard: Mark’s issue with employee satisfaction is most companies measure it annually which provides little opportunity to take action on the findings. While I agree, I also worry about…