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…
Archive | strategy
The Danger of Increased Efficiency
One of my most common rants is to try to dispel the notion that efficiency is the same thing as effectiveness. While the words sound similar and are often used interchangeably, they mean something different. From my performance management perspective, efficiency is doing work in the right way while effectiveness is doing the right work….
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?…
Top 10 Books on Performance Management
People frequently ask me which book they should read to learn more about strategy and performance management. While there are many books worth reading, I don’t think there’s a single book that gives you a complete enough view. Both strategy and performance management come in many flavors, and you have to read several books to appreciate the breadth….
The Superstar CFO
CFO Research Services recently published a report called “The Superstar CFO: Optimizing an increasingly complex role” based on a research survey of 350+ senior finance executives from a broad cross-section of company segments. The goal of the survey was to identify the attributes of highly successful CFOs; not just what they do but also what they…
Management Without Walking Around
You can accomplish your management by walking around goals without actually walking around. The walking (or wandering) around was never the point. As I said in my initial 2006 post, For Hewlett and Packard, managing by walking around (MBWA) was a way to get everyone on the same page; what they believed was the secret…
The Performance Management Epidemic
Performance management is more popular than ever; it’s practically an epidemic. Just a few years ago there were only three or four conferences dedicated to the topic. So far this year I’ve already been to 10 and the conference season doesn’t even get into full swing until later this month. Why the extraordinary rise in…
Balancing Control and Empowerment
One of the first articles we had to read during my recent HBS class was “Control in an Age of Empowerment” by Robert Simons. Even though the article was published in Harvard Business Review more than 10 years ago, I had never read it before and a quick poll of my classmates suggests very few…
No Time To Think
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…
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…