An article in Industrial Market Trends alerted me to the Goldense Group 2008 Product Development Metrics Survey of the top 10 R&D metrics used by industry: R&D spending as a percentage of sales (77 percent); Total patents filed/pending/awarded/rejected (61 percent); Total R&D headcount (59 percent) Current-year percentage sales due to new products released in the past six…
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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…
Holiday week ramblings
Some performance management ramblings to kick off your holiday week: (A) Barry suggests Four Questions To Ask When Building Your First Strategy Map: What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors? What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage? What are the three most significant gaps or barriers…
Performance Anxiety
Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership. How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
Predictions, redux
Even though my recent post on BI predictions is still generating higher-than-normal traffic, I assumed that the annual season of prognostication had died down; after all, it’s already Feb. But over on the BI Questions Blog, Timo strays from declaring the death of One Version of the Truth to provide some suggestions that BI/PM vendors…
Am I A Blogger?
I ran into James Governor at SAP’s Influencer Summit this week. As he points out in the comments on my inaugural post, James was the chief hassler to get me started on this blog. In the interim, he’s been both wildly supportive and correctly critical. Not surprisingly, we had an engaging and fascinating conversation about…
There Is ROI In Nagging
Picking a controversial or intriguing title for a blog post is a pretty good way to encourage more people to read it. Gary seems to be following this strategy when he titled his latest post “From Nag to Wag – Why Performance Management Now?” And it worked… when the title appeared in my feedreader, I…
Performance Gaps
An operations manager stops by your office (he’s managing by walking around) and says he has good news and bad news. The good news is that the company shipped more widgets to customers last quarter than it did the previous quarter but the bad news is that executive management thinks that we performed worse. How…
Dash-bored
If you weren’t convinced that dashboards have become over-hyped, these two Dilbert strips that appeared last week should be the final straw: (Click twice to enlarge the comics) The intellectual side of me would like to defend our profession and chalk these up as simply cartoons designed to elicit a laugh. Unfortunately, they are…