You know that feeling when all your ducks appear to be in a row, all the numbers add up, all the boxes have been checked, but you’ve still got a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong? I’m not talking just gut feel here, more along the lines of, “The logic
With the increasing emphasis on responsiveness, resiliency, flexibility and agility, I suppose it was only a matter of time before the “agile” concept caught up with strategy itself. While I may have hinted at this idea four years ago in two of my earliest posts for the Value Alley, “Strategy
Performance management systems are becoming more important to local governments across the country. This is true for several reasons. Citizens are calling for a more accurate accounting of how their tax monies are being spent. Local government revenues have not been growing as much as in the past and, in
“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
You’ve likely played an organized sport at some time in your life - How many different ways were there to keep score? How many different ways were there to determine the winner? Just one – right? It was goals, or runs, or points, or something, but never goals and/or assists,
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. If we’ve heard it once we’ve heard it a thousand times. I even wrote one of my early posts on this topic (“When metrics collide”). Consultants, analysts, academics and other thought leaders have examined and questioned its veracity, but still the consensus seems to be that
Dateline: October 4, 2012 – Facebook reaches one billion users! One billion people connected on a single platform; one-seventh of the world’s population. If you assume 40,000 BCE as the start of modern humans, it took the planet 41,804 years to reach a population level of one billion; it took
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,
Clarence So, Chief Strategy Officer for Salesforce.com, opened last month’s Chief Strategy Officer Summit in San Francisco (by the IE Group) with a challenging statement: ‘Your strategy is nothing more than the sum of your tactics’. I found this to be less than satisfactory as an explanation, but considering the
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
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
I have previously dealt independently with issues of forecasting, planning, and budgeting in separate posts, and the time has now come to pull them all together in one place and just come out and say what I really mean. This integrative post was prompted by a recent invitation I received
If you are feeling out of sorts, a bit down and out, and want to take it all the way to full-blown depression, have I got a book recommendation for you: “Normal Accidents”, by Charles Perrow (1984). Perrow’s premise is that we have designed certain systems, nuclear reactors being his primary
“Our performance last month was 46.” Oh, you don’t have to thank me, I was just doing my job. Not very well, I might add. 46? 46 what? Or 46 who’s? Without context, 46 is just a number, just data. In context, perhaps that’s 46 out of 48 (not too
Quiz time. Just to see if you learned anything from the last go around. The “V”, by the way, could stand for “volatile”, as in the 2008-09 global economic meltdown, or perhaps “volcano”, as in the 2010 eruptions of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano. Did you have a Plan V for the
With the exception of the occasional James Bond movie that proves the rule, we don’t as a matter of course combine our modes of transportation into one all-purpose vehicle, and we even tend to park our cars, boats and planes in separate facilities. But when it comes to financial management,
