In No Time to Think, Jack Trout claims we’ve become “a world of reactors, not thinkers.” In case you don’t recognize his name, Trout is the author of many marketing classics, including one of my personal favorites ‘The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing‘ which describes the First Mover Advantage. While technology was supposed to make us…
Archive | performance management
HBS and CPM
Because it’s been an uncharacteristic two full weeks since my last post, I thought I’d give everyone a quick update on what I’ve been up to. (No, Jerry, I haven’t decided to give up blogging, move to the Bahamas, and take up sailing.) I was a vacation during the week of July 4th – no…
Performance Gaps
An operations manager stops by your office (he’s managing by walking around) and says he has good news and bad news. The good news is that the company shipped more widgets to customers last quarter than it did the previous quarter but the bad news is that executive management thinks that we performed worse. How…
Dilbert strikes again
How many strategy management mistakes can you count? 1. Failure to adequately communicate the strategy 2. Failure to explain how the strategy impacts individuals 3. No formal cascade of objectives between high-level strategy (pointy haired boss) and next level down (Dilbert) 4. No way to monitor progress towards achieving objectives Did I miss any?
Strategy Management
The recent resurfacing of the BI vs. PM controversy got me thinking about the longstanding confusion between financial, workforce, and IT performance management. When most people hear the term performance management, they think of what I might describe as human capital management. That is clearly different than budgeting, planning, and consolidation. The multiple uses of…
A Rose By Any Other Name
Last week I weighed in on the on-going debate as to whether PM is the same thing as BI. The Performance Guys seemed to agree with my assessment and echoed my belief that performance management involves motivation, not just monitoring and measuring. I’d only point out that motivation doesn’t necessarily require money; I once did…
BI vs. PM
I thought the debate as to whether business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) were the same thing had long since been settled. Imagine my surprise when Mark Smith points out in “BI Is Not Performance Management” that the discussion is alive and well. Rather than spill more ink documenting the differences between business intelligence and…
Dash-bored
If you weren’t convinced that dashboards have become over-hyped, these two Dilbert strips that appeared last week should be the final straw: (Click twice to enlarge the comics) The intellectual side of me would like to defend our profession and chalk these up as simply cartoons designed to elicit a laugh. Unfortunately, they are…
Performance Management Saves Lives
You can always count on Bob Hanson of Sarasota County for a good performance management story. Here’s one that I heard him tell recently: The Parks and Rec department struggled with recruiting and retaining lifeguards for the public pools. People viewed being a lifeguard as only a summer job, not a career, so job satisfaction…
Multiple Targets
If you’re a performance management practitioner, you already know metrics should have both an actual and a target value. Actual is the current value of a metric while target is the value you would like it to be. (NB: I strongly prefer using the word target instead of goal because the latter can easily be…