Performance management continuously invades my personal life, whether it’s on airplanes, during mentoring, or at Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s another example: Not long after I moved into my previous house, a friendly neighbor came over to welcome me to the block. Amid advice on local stores and restaurants, he pointed out that my front lawn wasn’t…
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…
As I’m done bashing MBOs (for now), I might as well revisit my long-standing concern with the ubiquitous red/yellow/green traffic light metaphor. While the metaphor is intended as a simple summary of performance (green = good, red = not good), for most business situations three levels of performance are not enough to truly judge results….
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…
An article in Industrial Market Trends alerted me to the Goldense Group 2008 Product Development Metrics Survey of the top 10 R&D metrics used by industry: R&D spending as a percentage of sales (77 percent); Total patents filed/pending/awarded/rejected (61 percent); Total R&D headcount (59 percent) Current-year percentage sales due to new products released in the past six…
Readers of this blog will know I have a deep affinity for a portion of Performance Management that has come to be known as Strategy Management. The most obvious explanation for my passion is the fact I ran a company often cited as pushing the envelope in strategy management. However, I’ve also always felt the…
While I don’t know if I’m “Smarter than a Fifth Grader”, I assumed that I was smarter than a goldfish. But when I read Contrarian Goldfish’s “Smart Goals are Stupid”, I began to wonder. After all, I wrote about the usefulness of SMART objectives. So, let’s investigate: 1. Specific CG says “you cannot predict the…
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….
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…
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…