This weekend’s Wall Street Journal contained an article by former Chrysler and General Motors executive Bob Lutz called “Life Lessons from a Car Guy.” Lutz believes that different kinds of organizations require different kinds of leaders. A loosely-connected conglomerate like General Electric requires a leader with vision and portfolio management skills; investing/divesting lines of business,…
Ever wonder why it’s so difficult to catch a cab on a rainy evening? Common sense suggests the reason is that people prefer riding to walking when it’s raining. Given a fixed supply, cabs are less likely to be available since more people want them. While this explanation seems obvious, economic theory suggests otherwise. As…
After hours of pre-game hype before Super Bowl 2011, I began to wonder “how super is the Super Bowl?” Compared to other sporting events’ championships, it has gained almost mythic proportions – today is known as “Super Bowl Sunday” and by some estimates trails only Thanksgiving as an American food holiday. I don’t hear that kind…
How did I do with my tongue-in-cheek 2010 New Year’s resolutions? Here’s a report card: 10. Less BlackBerry reading; more blackberry eating Fail. I read more BlackBerry emails than I ate blackberries. 9. Avoid 2010 meaning that I traveled to 20 cities on 10 airlines Partial credit. 16 cities on 6 airlines. 8. Leverage twitter…
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…
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…
“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…
Halloween statistics can be scary. According to a survey of 8,526 people conducted by BIGresearch for the National Retail Federation (NRF), consumers spent an average of $56.31 on Halloween in 2009, down 15% from $66.54 last year. The survey blames the economy, citing that nearly a third of consumers said the economy negatively impacted their…
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…
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…