For the last 10 years, U.S. News & World Report has published an annual ranking of the top American hospitals in 16 specialties and 20+ metro areas. In the 2010 survey, only 152 of the 4,852 hospitals evaluated performed well enough to rank in any specialty. Of those 152, fourteen of them were given ‘honor role’…
Why are unimportant decisions so hard for people to make? The conventional wisdom is people don’t make decisions due to the fear of being wrong. However, in “Decision Quicksand: When Trivial Choices Suck Us In,” research suggests excessive information and extraneous choices trick our brains into thinking a decision is more complicated than it really…
Sometimes you have to think outside the camel. At a recent management offsite, I adopted the phrase “Think different, act different” as a rallying cry for the team. I was trying to emphasize the dangers of group think so I reminded them of the story of ten monkeys in the cage. I didn’t just want…
Lake Superior State University released its 36th annual “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness”. The list is based on more than 1,000 submissions on their Web site. The winners (losers?) include the Sarah Palin-coined word “refudiate” and the popular online terms “viral” and “fail.” LSSU’s complete list…
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…
Words matter. Using the the phrase software consumption rather than building, marketing, and selling software can allow you to re-imagine your business. Here’s one such story: I’m a fan of the logic model because it emphasizes outcome KPIs that monitor impact rather than output metrics that track activities. I also like strategy maps because they are simple…
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…
Performance management continuously invades my personal life, whether it’s on airplanes, during mentoring, or at Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s another example: Not long after I moved into my previous house, a friendly neighbor came over to welcome me to the block. Amid advice on local stores and restaurants, he pointed out that my front lawn wasn’t…
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…
On Friday, a colleague in another division asked me “How do you measure the effectiveness of analysts relations?” It’s an unanswerable question we’ve all been asked 1000 times about a wide variety of topics (even a marine terminal gate). As I said then, every time someone asks you to show them the measures, be sure to…