This Focused Performance Weblog started life as a "business management blog" containing links and commentary related primarily to organizational effectiveness with a "Theory of Constraints" perspective, but is in the process of evolving towards primary content on interactive and mobile marketing. Think of it as about Focusing marketing messages for enhanced Performance. If you are on an archive page, current postings are found here.
Non-baseball organizations need to track their progress with certain numbers and, like baseball's wins and losses, these really do matter. But frequently they don't match the quality of the group's efforts. How many times have you run a project or new initiative you know was really good and well-executed but the bottom line hasn't shown equal-quality results in the short term? Too often. Sometimes your competitor does something half-axed and blows away the market. The bottom line result doesn't always reflect the quality of the decisions and effort that went into the efforts.
I'm seeing my recent theme everywhere. Fortunately, the piece keeps me honest by continuing...
Quality, clarity of vision, persistence, ability to change plans adaptively on the fly tends to win over the long term, but guarantees nothing over the short term. If management knows what the constituents of successful performance are (in baseball, runs scored relative to runs allowed), they can keep track of these key components and ratios as well as the obvious surface indications of success and failure. They can use these measures to take a longer view and apply their resources more intelligently.
The good news is, companies don't fail because of bad management. The bad news is, they fail because of good management. "By doing what they must do to keep their margins strong and their stock price healthy, every company paves the way for its own disruption," Christensen says. It was a simple, elegant, and terrifying conclusion: The drive to success becomes a death march.
Maybe strong margins and stock prices are not the numbers behind success (duh!). One buzzword of recent days, coming from recent reports about Iraq war "intelligence" seems to be "group-think." I suspect that a lot of managers suffer from the same malady. Finding the meaningful metrics probably means breaking out of it.
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