My previous company used the slogan ‘aligning execution with strategy’ to emphasize that often what companies do (their execution) often doesn’t match what they say they want to do (their strategy). The phrase became so common among employees, partners, and customers that we would sometimes slip up and say ‘aligning strategy with execution.’ When that happened, I would often…
In a short, but insightful, piece called ‘What’s Missing from Your Scorecard?’ Mark Graham Brown suggests eight categories of metrics which should be better represented on a balanced scorecard: Mark’s issue with employee satisfaction is most companies measure it annually which provides little opportunity to take action on the findings. While I agree, I also worry about…
For many years, I’ve argued that performance management is not just limited to finance but instead has many flavors, including workforce, operational, and IT performance management. Most people now seem to agree and there’s even talk of pervasive performance management. However, a critical analysis of the current situation suggests that marketing organizations are still early on…
Last month Ingrid Koehler (re)started an interesting discussion on whether citizens should be considered customers. While the debate isn’t necessarily new, it might be back in vogue with a majority of U.S. voters clamoring for change but the nation in a difficult financial situation. In a comment, Kari Manovitch suggests one size doesn’t fit all and that community, customer or…
As Balanced Scorecard practitioners know, Kaplan and Norton recommend five principles for strategy focused organizations: translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone’s everyday job; make strategy a continual process; and mobilize leadership for change. The City of Charlotte, NC applied these principles to become a Balanced Scorecard…
Bernard Marr must be a believer in my theory that catchy headlines promote increased readership. How else to explain that the long-time performance management guru resorted to the titillating title “Performance Anxiety” for an otherwise solid article on the potential perils of poorly implemented performance systems? Bernard observes that “performance management initiatives were often so…
There hasn’t been enough debate on this blog recently so I’m hoping this post will stir things up a bit. Over at the other guys, Frank wrote a post titled EPM and Strategy Management that I had to read four or five times to understand. Even now, I’m not completely sure what he’s getting at. My confusion…
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…
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…
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,…