It’s important to understand the difference between speed and velocity in business. In physics, velocity and speed are different things. Speed refers to how fast an object is moving; the rate at which an object covers distance. Velocity refers to the rate and direction at which an object changes its position. As an example, consider…
For many years, my routine was a Sunday hike followed by a Sunday blog. For a variety of reasons, both my hiking and blogging have become erratic. After skipping yet another Sunday hike, I was surprised to find that I still had exceeded 10,000 steps per day for the past week. 10,000 is the number…
I’m a big proponent of using scorecards to monitor progress to well-defined objectives. Earlier in my career, I ran a software company that used scorecards to help dozens of companies around the world ensure their execution was in line with their strategy. When using scorecards, I’ve cautioned that unless you compare yourself against an external…
For much of my career, I’ve argued that people design key performance indicators (KPIs) incorrectly. One of my own favorite blogs made the case that, unless you compare yourself against some external benchmark, you might be making progress towards achieving your KPIs but actually losing ground. Simplistically, if you’re growing by 20% and the market…
No, this isn’t some new comic from Scott Adams about Dilbert interacting with Donald Trump – although I’m laughing about the possibilities. Instead it’s a central tenet of Adams’ most recent book titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams relies on his trademark humor to describe “the strategies he has…
It’s March Madness, Baby! Most readers will recognize this catch-phrase celebrating the annual NCAA men’s college basketball tournament whose opening rounds just concluded. The tournament includes 64 teams organized into four separate regions which play over three long weekends until deciding a champion. Some – including me – believe it’s the most exciting tournament in…
After many years as a performance management enthusiast, I sometimes forget how much confusion there still is around the topic. Since I’m a big believer that standardized language helps reduce confusion, I’ve decided to summarize some of my deeply held beliefs on performance management: An objective describes what you want to accomplish. For example, ‘win…
Two of my most popular posts (as measured by WordPress stats) are quotes about performance management (Feb 2009, Sept 2009). Given that popularity, I’ve listed even more performance management quotes: “An obstacle is what you see when you are no longer focused on the goal.” Anonymous (Anyone know who said this?) “Some people achieve the…
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…
In a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled “Management lessons from the financial crisis,” UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt coins the term smooth-sailing fallacy: This smooth-sailing fallacy arises when we mistake a measure for reality. Competent management always looks deeper than the numbers, deeper than the current measures. Incompetent management just focuses on the metrics, on the body…