Strategy consultants seem to recommend to go beyond the core blue ocean. Confused? Let me explain. Chris Zook’s book Beyond the Core describes how an organization can continue to grow after its core business has plateaued by finding adjacent opportunities which both leverage and reinforce its core strengths. Zook recommends a series of small, harmonious adjacent moves to maximize long-term…
By now, most of us have read about organizations that attempted to improve their performance by deploying dashboards populated with financial and operational metrics only to discover that managing by numbers alone didn’t improve their performance. Instead, organizations must go beyond keeping score to ensure that everyone has a common understanding of both what they are trying…
If you’re in or around the performance management market, you’ve no doubt already heard about SAP’s acquisition of Pilot Software. If you only read the official press release which describes it as a “tuck-in” acquisition, you might not realize how significant an event this really was. Certainly the analysts seem supportive; John Hagerty of AMR…
Balanced scorecards should sometimes be imbalanced. Over in the PMA Forum, Alan Meeks suggests the word balance is counterproductive, as it’s impractical to assign equal weight to each of the four perspectives. He argues for a ‘genuinely systemic scorecard’ – not nearly as catchy, is it? As I replied, the original intent of the term balance was…
Much to my own surprise, this week’s blog is about another book. But, unlike last week, it’s not about performance management per se but rather what we can learn about aligning an organization from the sport of baseball. Yup, baseball. The book, Management by Baseball by Jeff Angus, purports to provide “The Official Rules For…