As I’ve said before, performance management seems to be invading my personal life. Somehow I looked at Thanksgiving Day through the lens of the logic model: Input Measures Three extended families including 17 adults, 4 kids, and a dog Entirely too much money spent at Whole Foods Countless hours in the kitchen over several days Output Measures…
Much to my own surprise, this week’s blog is about another book. But, unlike last week, it’s not about performance management per se but rather what we can learn about aligning an organization from the sport of baseball. Yup, baseball. The book, Management by Baseball by Jeff Angus, purports to provide “The Official Rules For…
Because performance management is such a popular term these days, you would expect lots of books being published pushing esoteric new methodologies or describing successful client implementations. I wouldn’t be surprised if I walked into my local bookstore and discovered “Performance Management for Dummies” on the shelf. Oddly, however, this hasn’t happened. There really aren’t…
At a recent performance management workshop, I asked an attendee for an example metric he was using to track performance. The attendee, who worked for a city’s public works department, immediately replied “# of miles of streets cleaned.” Before I could ask any questions, he proudly added “and we cleaned more than 1000 miles last…
Sometimes I think performance management is invading my personal life. A student I have been mentoring happily announced during one of our recent meetings that she had gotten a 46 on her latest algebra quiz. I’m no math major but normally any score under 60 is a failing grade. How could she be so pleased…
If you’ve attended one of my performance management workshops, you know I caution against using the traditional traffic light metaphor to represent performance. Yes, the visual is nearly universally understood (green = good, red = not good) and simple communication is indeed a key to improving performance. However, in many business situations, three states are…
I lost a day. Actually, I didn’t lose it so much as it didn’t exist. At least for me. Here’s how it happened. On Friday, Sept 1 2006 I boarded a 14-hour overnight flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong. I had been shortchanging my sleep all week so I was exhausted and fell asleep…
I’ve been on the road for the last two weeks so it’s only in the last couple of days that I’ve been able to catch up with some of the items on my to-do list. This morning I listened to a Web seminar that provided a three-step method for moving from basic measures to key performance…