"You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error." ~ Tim Harford TED Talk link: http://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford Karl Marx died thinking that the first communist revolution would occur in Great Britain, driven by the long hours and unsafe
Tag: performance management
How much of your business performance (profit) is driven by external factors versus internal? A figure of 85% compared to 15% was mentioned at last month’s Manufacturing Analytics Summit, and although I could not find the study mentioned to confirm, it feels about right to me. Certainly more than half,
“Please Mr CEO, sir, can you find just a few brief moments in your busy schedule for a group of us humble and undeserving employees to discuss our strategic initiative to totally transform the company?” No matter what the topic or function, the one consistent element of every successful significant
This quote from Gandhi (similar to one made centuries earlier by Lao Tzu), is the typical formulation we learned in Psychology 101: beliefs precede attitude, which precedes behavior, and the conclusion typically arrived at is that in order to change behavior you need to get to the root cause and change beliefs.
During a recent presentation on performance management I had an audience member ask me if perhaps I had minored in cynicism along with my degree in finance. I replied that, with the science, psychology and philosophy I’d taken, I probably had minored in skepticism, but that the cynicism came later,
I remarked in an earlier post (“BI and Better Decisions”) that, prior to joining SAS, while I understood analytics and performance management just fine, the phrase ‘business intelligence’ was not in my vocabulary”. Turns out I’m not the only finance professional so inflicted. I was invited last week to give a
The future of business is the martial arts CEO, the jujitsu strategist. Far too many organizations approach business with an American football mentality, complete with scripted plays, huddles and time outs, but the real world isn’t quite so convenient and accommodating. The real business world is 7x24 with no time outs
When you begin your career your most important skills are your hard, technical skills; the finance and accounting, the statistics and economics, the physics and chemistry, the engineering and calculus. But as I tell my business school mentees, as your career progresses, the emphasis changes such that much sooner than
Think about what it’s like to learn to ride a bicycle, or play the piano, or hit a fast ball, or to coach a group of middle schoolers to do the same. If asked to explain how you stay balanced on a bicycle, you probably couldn’t do it. If you
The role of the CIO is changing. Or was that the CFO? The CEO maybe? Somebody's role is changing, that much I do know. How many times have you read just such an opening statement in an article or white paper and muttered “duh?” to yourself before moving on to