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The Advisor’s Corner – If I Don’t Measure, Can I Manage?

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Question:

There are several axioms regarding measurement such as:

  • What gets measured gets done.
  • What gets measured and rewarded gets done well.
  • If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
  • What gets measured gets managed.

Is it really true that if something is not measured it is not being managed? Not everything can be measured simply because of resource constraints and I would hesitate to assert that these areas subsequently suffer from management neglect. What are your thoughts?

StrategyDriven Response:

The short answer is no. Not measuring something does not necessarily equate to its not being managed. An organization’s limited resources dictate that only a finite number of activities can be directly measured; just as a manager’s limited available time prevents all activities from being directly monitored. But while these cliches do not represent an absolute truth, managers do need to recognize current realities in terms of defined future goals in order to possess the knowledge necessary to formulate their organization’s activities. Performance measures represent one very effective means of acquiring this knowledge on a routine basis with relatively minimal cost.

Therefore, a key manager responsibility is to identify those few performance measures that will best enable him or her to guide their organization in the achievement of the company’s mission goals in the most efficient manner possible. These measures must necessarily monitor the conduct of ongoing production work and support identification and implementation of improvement opportunities. Because an organization’s circumstances and the market environment change over time, the adopted performance measures will likely be changed and/or replaced over time.

Final Thought…

Since having no performance measures is not an option, the real challenge becomes determining what to measure in order to effectively manages while at the same time remaining within the organization’s constrained resource budget. Several StrategyDriven articles, podcasts, and whitepapers are dedicated to the topic of identifying the right performance measures including:

Articles

Podcasts

Whitepapers

Lastly, it is important to recognize that the reverse is not necessarily true either; having performance measures does not necessarily result in a process or activity being managed or managed well. Performance measures are simply a management tool without which effective management is difficult.

Leadership Inspirations – Making Mistakes

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“A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.”

George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Irish playwright and the only person to have been awarded both the Nobel Prize for Literature (1925) and an Oscar (1938)

Tactical Execution Warning Flag 1 – Incomplete Staff Work

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StrategyDriven Tactical Execution Warning Flag"The job is not done until the paperwork is signed."

StrategyDriven Contributors

All too often, documentation of job performance is trivialized, viewed as an unimportant impediment to progress and is either not completed or not completed well. What goes unrecognized is the impact this documentation has on performance improvement, equipment reliability, and financial accounting; all of which affect a company's bottom line.

 
 
 
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StrategyDriven Podcast Special Edition 13 – An Interview with Michael Dunn, author of The Marketing Accountability Imperative

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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 13 – An Interview with Michael Dunn, author of The Marketing Accountability Imperative explores the challenges and solutions to creating alignment between an organization’s strategic and marketing plans and accountability to achieving predetermined marketing results. During our discussion, Michael Dunn, author of The Marketing Accountability Imperative: Driving Superior Returns on Marketing Investments and CEO and Chairman of Prophet, shares with us his insights regarding:

  • what marketing accountability is and how it benefits an organization
  • three Horizons organizations go through in order to achieve marketing accountability
  • landmines and enablers to achieving marketing accountability
  • common marketing performance metrics used by accountable organizations

Additional Information

Complimenting the outstanding insights Michael shares in The Marketing Accountability Imperative and this special edition podcast are the additional resources accessible from his organization’s website at www.Prophet.com. Michael’s book, The Marketing Accountability Imperative, can be purchased by clicking here.

About the Author

Michael Dunn, author of The Marketing Accountability Imperative, is CEO and Chairman of Prophet, a marketing consultancy that helps senior executives balance their organization’s short-term business needs against their long-term growth goals. Michael and his organization serve numerous Fortune 500 companies including GE, Johnson & Johnson, Staples, UBS, and American Airlines. To read Michael’s full biography, click here.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 35:37 — 48.9MB)

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Leadership Inspirations – Inspiring Leadership

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“Our chief want is someone who will inspire us to be what we know we could be.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist, philosopher, and poet

True leadership is inspirational; motivating individuals to become far more than what they currently are. Leadership is not about coordinating activities, setting deadlines, and reporting status; those activities are the work of managers.

Leadership is visionary, creating a picture of a better alternative tomorrow and then inspiring others to passionately seek that vision with a level of commitment that is often unexplainable. There are instances of this type of leadership all around us, the leadership provided by the brave men and women who in our moment of greatest need do the unimaginable to keep us safe from fire, flood, and those who would do us harm. There are also leaders like Matt Harding, who inspired thousands of people from around the world to join together in the fellowship of the dance to make the video “Where the hell is Matt?”.

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

“Management creates order where there would otherwise be chaos. Leadership inspires the achievement of greatness.”

StrategyDriven Contributors