Financial Week reports that “according to a study to be released [in October] by executive recruiter Crist Kolder Associates, roughly half of the CFOs at Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies stay in their posts for less than three years.” This equates to the average tenure of an NFL running back. Before you get too impressed,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
CFO Research Services recently published a report called “The Superstar CFO: Optimizing an increasingly complex role” based on a research survey of 350+ senior finance executives from a broad cross-section of company segments. The goal of the survey was to identify the attributes of highly successful CFOs; not just what they do but also what they…
You can accomplish your management by walking around goals without actually walking around. The walking (or wandering) around was never the point. As I said in my initial 2006 post, For Hewlett and Packard, managing by walking around (MBWA) was a way to get everyone on the same page; what they believed was the secret…
One of the first articles we had to read during my recent HBS class was “Control in an Age of Empowerment” by Robert Simons. Even though the article was published in Harvard Business Review more than 10 years ago, I had never read it before and a quick poll of my classmates suggests very few…
In No Time to Think, Jack Trout claims we’ve become “a world of reactors, not thinkers.” In case you don’t recognize his name, Trout is the author of many marketing classics, including one of my personal favorites ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing‘ which describes the First Mover Advantage. While technology was supposed to make us…