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…
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…
As much as I believe in the concept of organizational alignment, I always find it a bit dismaying that so few other people seem to be blogging about it. Imagine my surprise when I stumbled on this post from a Deloitte Consulting blog called “Corporate Performance Management – The Next Step”. A primary goal of…
This week at ASMI’s Balanced Scorecard Masters Conference I gave a talk entitled “Performance Alignment: Cascading Enterprise Strategy Throughout the Organization.” For those of you who may not be familiar with the concept of cascading, it’s a formal method for achieving alignment throughout an organization. Cascading isn’t the only possibility: all employee phone calls, status meetings,…
Do you need an informal way to convince your coworkers that your organization could benefit from performance management? That the principles of managing by walking around could improve your organization’s alignment? Here’s a poem that was written more than 150 years ago that might help: The Blind Men and The Elephant John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)…
Ask someone to describe the culture of companies in Silicon Valley and you’re likely to get responses like “unstructured”, “entrepreneurial”, and “decentralized.” Ask for examples of how they differ from their East Coast counterparts and you might hear about Friday afternoon beer bashes, T-shirts and jeans every day of the week, or the proliferation of…