A little more than six months ago, I took a new role with a group that was described as in need of a “turn-around” and an “updated strategy and direction”. I was urged to introduce a new mission/vision, strategic objectives, and revised key performance indicators. Given my performance management background, this seemed like a reasonable…
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…
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post that pointed out the benefits of management by walking around can be achieved without actually leaving your desk. Some examples are as follows: Management can mimic the shopping experience of a prospective customer by visiting a Web site and trying to find/buy a particular product. It’s…
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…
“Which blogs are the most popular?” It’s a question I’ve started hearing again lately, especially as many of my work colleagues have begun experimenting with social media. This is an unanswerable measurement question, just like for analyst relations or marine terminal gates. To try to answer the question, many people cite Technorati’s Top Blogs (original link…
Despite the fact that only two of my readers have pointed it out, it’s painfully obvious to me that I haven’t posted in two weeks. While two weeks isn’t very long, I pride myself on posting weekly and commited to measuring frequency of posting just a few months ago. The few days off I took for Thanksgiving…
A few weeks ago I got a chance to listen to Geoff Colvin talk about his new book, The Upside of the Downturn. Geoff, a long-time editor and columnist for Fortune Magazine, is an engaging speaker and he peppered his opening comments with headlines from that morning’s newspapers. He also made the intriguing claim death…
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…
For those of you who remember the series of posts two years ago defining objectives for this blog, you’ll recall that I decided that average number of comments per post and number of unique visitors per month were better measures of my success than number of page views or frequency of posts. Regardless, I was…
In a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled “Management lessons from the financial crisis,” UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt coins the term smooth-sailing fallacy: This smooth-sailing fallacy arises when we mistake a measure for reality. Competent management always looks deeper than the numbers, deeper than the current measures. Incompetent management just focuses on the metrics, on the body…