I received the following email about my Love/Hate Boss post: Your recent comments about relationship between boss styles and KPIs really hit home but in a different context than you described. My boss is currently developing KPIs for me and my team to judge our 2008 performance and he asked me for input. When workers…
Archive | metrics
The Risk of Spreadsheets
Unless you were trapped on a desert island over the last few months, it’s unlikely that you missed the Société Générale scandal and the resulting teeth-gnashing about the need for stricter controls and oversight in the financial services industry. While I’m all for better access and process controls leading to improved segregation of duties, I…
Love or Fear the Boss
Should you love or fear the boss? In a Harvard Business Review article entitled Love and Fear and the Modern Boss, Scott Snook writes: Five hundred years ago, Niccolò Machiavelli posed the question of whether it is better for a leader to be loved or feared, concluding that if you can’t be both (and few…
SMART Objectives
Over at Crossderry, Paul talks about the challenges of choosing SMART objectives for performance evaluations. As he points out, coming up with good objectives isn’t easy and, all too often, managers and employees settle for ones that are innocuous and toothless. I wish the situation were otherwise but in most companies there’s no compelling reasons…
A Sustainable Performance Lesson from the Grinch
With the arrival of the holiday season comes the inevitable onslaught of television classics, including “It’s a Wonderful Life” and “Home Alone”. While each are good movies in their own right, I wonder if the latter became a holiday staple largely based on the sheer number of times it was repeated in the first few…
Am I A Blogger?
I ran into James Governor at SAP’s Influencer Summit this week. As he points out in the comments on my inaugural post, James was the chief hassler to get me started on this blog. In the interim, he’s been both wildly supportive and correctly critical. Not surprisingly, we had an engaging and fascinating conversation about…
There Is ROI In Nagging
Picking a controversial or intriguing title for a blog post is a pretty good way to encourage more people to read it. Gary seems to be following this strategy when he titled his latest post “From Nag to Wag – Why Performance Management Now?” And it worked… when the title appeared in my feedreader, I…
Blogging Performance, part 2
After the reading the comments on my previous Blogging Performance post, I decided to revise my mission statement: Mission: To be a top of mind destination for performance management information and interactive discussions. According to my jumpstart methodology, the next step is to define specific objectives using the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives: financial, customer, process, and…
Blogging Performance
How’s your blog doing? That’s a question I get frequently and I fumble for a good answer. Normally I mention that my readership seems to increase every month and leave it at that. But the question – and my fumbled answer – are a constant reminder I’ve never established any objectives for this blog. As such, I…
Is Satisfaction Or Loyalty Better?
Jeffrey Gitomer starts an article titled If your customers are satisfied, why are they leaving? with the provocative statement: Customer satisfaction is dead. Gitomer claims customer loyalty matter whereas customer satisfaction does not. Instead of measuring satisfaction, Gitomer recommends you should ask customers three questions to gauge loyalty: Will they do business with you again?…