Have you ever made dinner reservations at multiple restaurants and then forgotten to cancel the ones that you didn’t use? While multiple reservations might be convenient for diners, no-shows cost restaurants thousands of dollars per month. The most common way to reduce these losses is to take customers’ credit card information at the time of…
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,…
At the 84th annual Scripps National Spelling Bee, Sukanya Roy, a 14-year-old from northeastern Pennsylvania, correctly spelled cymotrichous to win the top prize over 274 other spellers after 20 rounds. Cymotrichous? I had no idea that word existed, let alone what it meant. Cymotrichous, which means having wavy hair, isn’t even recognized by the spell checker in Microsoft…
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’…
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…
WordPress.com provides a wide variety of statistics that help you understand the health of your blog. Like most metrics, the WP statistics are one part useful and one part entertainment. To reinforce both of these attributes, earlier this month WP sent an email with their take on my blog. I’ve borrowed from their email but…
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…
One of the tenets of my management guidelines is that I emphasize results over effort. With a focus on outcomes rather than activities, I recommend metrics that track impact (how much change occurred) rather than output (how much was produced). I don’t like to reward people for trying hard if they were working on the…