One of the most common complaints about customer relationship management (CRM) systems is that individual reps don’t use them. This isn’t very surprising to me, as many CRM deployments are designed to give visibility to management or to streamline the ops person’s ability to forecast, rather than to add value to the individual rep. Organizations try…
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…
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…
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?…
One of the recurring themes during my week at HBS was understanding profitability. At first glance, profitability seems like a seductively simple topic. After all, aren’t profits just sales minus costs? The issue is that getting a handle on costs is a non-trivial exercise. For many organizations, the cost of goods sold (COGS) only represents the direct,…
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…
It seems like every few months someone tries to claim performance management is bad for organizations. The latest one comes from Phil Dourado who writes, “Target-based systems distort everything and most people’s behaviour.” Phil bases his indictment of performance management on several stories about the UK’s National Health Service in which “brilliant, dedicated people [are] pushed…
At a recent performance management conference, I attended a talk by the Manager of Strategic Business Planning at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) who described how they used performance management concepts to dramatically improve the agency. I showed up at the talk with skeptical attitude, as the post office does not have the best reputation…
I often use call centers as my default example when describing how better objectives and metrics can help improve performance. It’s not that performance in call centers is always poor. It’s just that executive management often regards the call center as nothing more than required overhead that burden the bottom line. Call center sometimes unwittingly…
I often use a honeycomb as a metaphor for a connected and aligned organization. In Performance Alignment: Cascading Strategy, I defined cascading as a formal method for achieving alignment by explicitly connecting strategy to operations to tactics. When cascading works well, every individual understands how his/her objectives supports the corporate objectives. I frequently get asked how…