With a final score of 43-8, Super Bowl XLVIII was widely considered to be not very super. To give you a sense of how non-competitive the game was, consider these two facts: The Seattle Seahawks spent a Superbowl record 59 minutes, 48 seconds in the lead. In other words, they scored 12 seconds into the game…
Early in my management career, the HR department sent out a single-question survey which asked how satisfied we were with our jobs on a scale of 0 (very unsatisfied) to 4 (highly satisfied). To my surprise, my group had the lowest average score (2.6) in the company. The HR VP predicted a mass exodus and told…
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…
At last week’s meeting of the CMO Community, a representative of the executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart mentioned that the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers at U.S. companies is 28 months, up five months from 2006. Great news, I thought, given my current role. However, remembering the earlier confusion on CFO tenure, I decided to do some fact…
Partially due to corporate sustainability reasons and partly due to old-fashioned cost savings, I’ve been thinking a lot about virtual events lately. The idea behind virtual events is pretty simple – rather than flying thousands of people to a single destination to discuss a series of topics, you have these discussions on-line. While simple in…
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged a book but on the plane back from Germany I stumbled on an email that Nenshad sent me back in Feb with an excerpt from Chapter 9 of “Beat the Odds: Avoid Corporate Death and Build a Resilient Enterprise” by Robert A. Rudzki. In a section called measure…
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…
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…
Several years ago, I visited a U.S. government agency that tracked more than 1000 different performance measures representing nearly every aspect of their operations. The measures came from multiple operational systems, a dozen or more Excel workbooks, and several employee and citizen surveys. The entire process was automated, allowing many of the measures to be updated daily…