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…
Archive | measurement missteps
Fun with tenure metrics
At last week’s meeting of the CMO Community, a representative of the executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart mentioned that the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers at U.S. companies is 28 months, up five months from 2006. Great news, I thought, given my current role. However, remembering the earlier confusion on CFO tenure, I decided to do some fact…
Prioritizing What’s Important
Long-time readers know I recommend creating an alignment-focused organization as the fundamental way to improve performance. As I’ve said in many publications (BPM Magazine, Information Management, CxO magazine), To do so, organizations must motivate their employees with integrated and cascaded objectives, manage priorities based on impacts rather than perceived urgency, monitor progress towards outcomes, and…
Traffic Lights redux
As I’m done bashing MBOs (for now), I might as well revisit my long-standing concern with the ubiquitous red/yellow/green traffic light metaphor. While the metaphor is intended as a simple summary of performance (green = good, red = not good), for most business situations three levels of performance are not enough to truly judge results….
Eliminate Management By Objectives
I’m deep into the annual review cycle and struggling with not-so-SMART objectives for employees that I inherited during the year. The frustration is acute enough that it makes me want to channel Deming and eliminate management by objectives. For those who may not remember, Deming is best known for his work in the 1950’s during which he…
More Gloom Than Doom
Over at Slate, Zachary Meisel and Jesse Pines have a sensationalist article entitled Waiting Doom that describes how hospitals are killing emergency room patients. They claim Esmin Green’s death was caused by the length of time she waited in the E.R. which they blame on the hospital practice of boarding inpatients. In their words, Despite increasing evidence that crowded E.R.s can…
Measuring Virtual Events
Partially due to corporate sustainability reasons and partly due to old-fashioned cost savings, I’ve been thinking a lot about virtual events lately. The idea behind virtual events is pretty simple – rather than flying thousands of people to a single destination to discuss a series of topics, you have these discussions on-line. While simple in…
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…
Beat The Odds
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged a book but on the plane back from Germany I stumbled on an email that Nenshad sent me back in Feb with an excerpt from Chapter 9 of “Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise” by Robert A. Rudzki. In a section called measure…
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…