An article in Industrial Market Trends alerted me to the Goldense Group 2008 Product Development Metrics Survey of the top 10 R&D metrics used by industry: R&D spending as a percentage of sales (77 percent); Total patents filed/pending/awarded/rejected (61 percent); Total R&D headcount (59 percent) Current-year percentage sales due to new products released in the past six…
Archive | metrics
CFO turnover subsides
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,…
CFO turnover hits record high
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,…
Target vs. Goal
While most people don’t distinguish between goals and objectives in every day conversation, I find that performance management practitioners sometimes use the word goal when they really mean target. This potential confusion between objectives and targets explains why I usually recommend against using the term goal when establishing a standard performance management terminology. From my…
Logic Model
While it dates back to the 1970s, the Logic Model gained prominence in the 1990s largely in response to the Government Performance and Results Act (GPRA). The Logic Model provides organizations with a framework for understanding the relation between resources or inputs (what an organization invests); activities or outputs (what an organization gets done); and…
Focused Organizations
As Balanced Scorecard practitioners know, Kaplan and Norton recommend five principles for strategy focused organizations: translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone’s everyday job; make strategy a continual process; and mobilize leadership for change. The City of Charlotte, NC applied these principles to become a Balanced Scorecard…
More Gloom Than Doom
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…
Riskfriends and Key Risk Indicators
I don’t normally promote other peoples’ blogs and instead comment on their posts or add them to my blogroll. However, I stumbled upon the Riskfriends Weblog which is dedicated “for risk professionals or people who just like risks”. Despite a little sleuthing, I haven’t been able to find out anything about the author other than…
Analysts on Strategy Management
Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…
Ghost in the blog
Recently, I was talking to this friend of mine (don’t you love stories that start this way?) who told me there’s an edict in her very-large-company that every executive should have an internal blog. The blog would serve as a way of explaining each executive’s departmental priorities, provide visibility to important issues that would benefit…