StrategyDriven Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag Article

Business Performance Assessment Program Warning Flag 2 – Crediting Good Intentions

“The road to ruin is paved with good intentions.”

German Proverb

Communicating assessment conclusions can be a difficult task, particularly in the case of improvement opportunities being presented to those directly managing or performing the function. Delivering the message is all the more difficult if those receiving it are organizationally senior to the self assessment lead or are influential favorites of the organization’s leaders. In these cases, business performance assessment leaders seeking a tactful way of communicating the ‘bad news’ often fall into the trap of crediting the good intentions and/or self identification of the issue by those responsible in order to put a positive spin on an otherwise negative message. Doing so, however, avoids the real issues at hand and can rob the organization of the opportunity to realize substantive performance improvements.


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Additional Resources

Lack of organizational accountability plays a significant role in the crediting of good intentions and recently self identified issues as assessment report conclusions. Principle, best practice, and warning flag articles on organizational accountability helping leaders enhance their company’s performance in this area can be found within the StrategyDriven topic: Organizational Accountability.

Other StrategyDriven recommended practices helping assessment teams avoid good intention and recently self identified issue conclusions can be found in:

Micah Solomon

Seven Secrets of Driving Customer Loyalty – and Profits

In these rough and recessionary times, it’s important to escape the commodity pricing wars and to find ways to strengthen the marketing backbone of your company. The most reliable and affordable way to achieve both these goals is by building a strong personal bond with your customers. Loyal customers see you as more valuable than a mere commodity purveyor, and can serve you as a powerful marketing arm, going out of their way promote and defend your company online and off – for free. Here are seven ways to get process started of building customer loyalty.

  1. Did you shine that doorknob? Research shows that customers remember the first and last minutes of a service encounter much more vividly – and for much longer – than all the rest of it. Make sure that the first and final elements of your customer interactions are particularly well engineered, because they are going to stick in the customer’s memory.

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    About the Author

    Micah SolomonMicah Solomon is the co-author with Leonardo Inghilleri of Exceptional Service, Exceptional Profit: The Secrets of Building a Five-Star Customer Service Organization (AMACOM Books) and President of Oasis Disc Manufacturing. His free online resource site for customer service advice is CollegeOfTheCustomer.com.

Leadership Inspirations – Continual Fear

“The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856 – 1915)

American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher, most famous for his essay A Message to Garcia

The New Thinking on KPIs, part 3 of 4

The four types of performance measures

I have come to the conclusion that there are four types of performance measures, as shown in Figure 3. This conclusion has come from: the research I have conducted; workshop feedback across diverse industries; and as a by-product of writing my book “Key Performance Indicators – developing, implementing and using winning KPIs”.


Figure 3: A scorecard with six perspectives

  • key result indicators (KRIs) – give an overview on past performance and are ideal for the Board as they communicate how management have done in a critical success factor or balanced scorecard perspective
  • performance indicators (PIs) – tell staff and management what to do
  • result indicators (RIs) – tell staff what they have done
  • key performance indicators (KPIs) – tell staff and management what to do to increase performance dramatically.


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About the Author

David Parmenter, author of Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing, and Using Winning KPIs and Pareto’s 80/20 Rule for Corporate Accountants, is an international presenter who is known for his thought provoking and lively sessions, which have led to substantial change in many organizations. He is a leading expert in developing winning KPIs, replacing the annual planning process with quarterly rolling planning, accelerating month-end processes, and converting reporting to a decision based tool.

David’s work on KPIs has received international recognition with clients in Auckland, Wellington, Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, Perth, Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, Tehran, Prague, Dublin, London, Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh. David is a fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales and has worked for Ernst & Young, BP Oil Ltd, Arthur Andersen, and Price Waterhouse Coopers.

David’s recent thinking is accessible from www.davidparmenter.com. He can be contacted at [email protected] or telephone +64 4 499 0007.

This articles is an extract from his “Implementing winning KPIs” whitepaper which can be downloaded from http://davidparmenter.com/how-to-guides)

StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 35 – An Interview with Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards

StrategyDriven Podcasts focus on the tools and techniques executives and managers can use to improve their organization’s alignment and accountability to ultimately achieve superior results. These podcasts elaborate on the best practice and warning flag articles on the StrategyDriven website.

Special Edition 35 – An Interview with Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards explores the motivations, conflicts, limitations, roles, and ethics of corporate boards; answering the often asked question of why Boards and their members behave the way they do. During our discussion, Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards: Managers of Risk, Sources of Risk and Professor of Finance and holder of the Frank W. Considine Chair of Applied Ethics at Loyola University Chicago, shares with us his insights and illustrative examples regarding:

  • the Board of Directors’ role in managing upside risk
  • how companies deal with the risk of diminished Board independence that occurs when the CEO is also the Chairman of the Board
  • what time-inconsistent misconduct is and why it occurs
  • why compensation plans may encourage executives to engage in exceedingly risky merger and acquisition deals and the actions Boards take to mitigate this risk
  • the Board’s role in establishing executive compensation, including those mechanisms that result in unduly rewarding failure
  • who the Board of Directors should serve… just shareholders or a broader group of stakeholders that includes shareholders, employees, the environment, and society

Additional Information

Robert’s book, Corporate Boards, can be purchased by clicking here.


About the Author

Robert Kolb, co-author of Corporate Boards, holds PhDs from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in philosophy and finance and has taught at the University of Florida, Emory University, the University of Miami, the University of Colorado, and Loyola University Chicago, where he currently serves as Professor of Finance and holds the Frank W. Considine Chair of Applied Ethics. Robert is the author or co-author of more than 50 research articles and 25 finance texts on topics, including financial derivatives, investments, corporate finance, and financial institutions. Robert recently edited the Encyclopedia of Business, Society, and Ethics. He also founded Kolb Publishing, Inc., which published finance and economics university texts and was acquired by Blackwell Publishing, now part of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. To read Robert’s complete biography, click here.