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…
Financial Week must be a little bit schizophrenic. A Sept 1, 2008 article titled “CFO turnover hits a record high” stated that, according to Crist Kolder Associates: CFO volatility—a measure of how often an executive leaves his or her finance post—reached its highest level in 13 years in 2007, with 128 CFOs departing their jobs,…
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,…
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…
One of the advantages of using WordPress for my blog is it has a decent amount of built-in reporting. For example, WordPress ranks entries by the total number of page views since they were first posted. Unfortunately, the built-in reports are limited to last 7 Days, 30 Days, Quarter, Year, and All Time. This means it’s difficult…
In my experience, most people don’t really understand how to track quality in a performance management system. Over the years, I’ve seen the strategic objectives and KPIs for dozens of organizations; large and small, commercial and public sector, US and International. I’ve previously claimed customer satisfaction is one of the most used – and least…
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…
Although she’s too far away to hear me, I want to give a big shout-out to Stacey Barr from Australia who describes herself as a performance measure specialist. In the Performance Measurement Association Discussion Forum, someone named “Eke, U” asks which parameters they should use to measure the performance of a marine terminal gate. I…