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…
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…
Unless you were trapped on a desert island over the last few months, it’s unlikely that you missed the Société Générale scandal and the resulting teeth-gnashing about the need for stricter controls and oversight in the financial services industry. While I’m all for better access and process controls leading to improved segregation of duties, I…
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…
I’ve been called a Web 2.0 thinker but I sure hope that Geek&Poke’s humorous send-up isn’t what happens to workforce performance management: (Thanks for the idea, Michaela)
Picking a controversial or intriguing title for a blog post is a pretty good way to encourage more people to read it. Gary seems to be following this strategy when he titled his latest post “From Nag to Wag – Why Performance Management Now?” And it worked… when the title appeared in my feedreader, I…
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…
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….
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….
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…