Openly, I get annoyed when people use the term planning to describe budgeting. While the terms planning and budgeting are often used interchangeably, they’re not the same thing. Budgeting is how you allocate resources (typically financial) to reach specific objectives. Budgeting helps you create an estimate of income and expenses for a specific time period. Budgeting manages money…
Archive | strategy
Measuring (Lack of) CRM Usage
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…
Measurement Missteps
Although I don’t get to do it nearly as much as I used to, one of my favorite parts of my job is helping organizations avoid measurement missteps. My focus is on strategy articulation, not strategy formulation. While other consultants focus on helping organizations figure out where they should go, I use performance management techniques to make…
Bad KPIs, bad behavior
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…
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…
Beyond the core blue ocean strategy
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…
BI Predictions for 2008
Last month Scoble ignited a debate about why enterprise software isn’t sexy. The blogging world piled on until Nicholas Carr declared it a firestorm. Despite the fact James’ analysis of SAP’s Business User story was one of the larger logs on the fire, I missed the chance to chime in due to my travel schedule…
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…
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…