Holiday week ramblings

Some thoughts on several recent postings to kick off your hoiday week.

 (A) Barry suggests Four Questions To Ask When Building Your First Strategy Map:

1.  What’s the advantage that differentiates us from our competitors?
2. What are the three most important things we need to measure to drive that advantage?
3. What are the three most significant gaps or barriers that keep us from leveraging this advantage?
4. What are the three things we can pursue to close the gaps, overcome the barriers and positively influence our three most important measures?

Good points but I would have liked to have seen a focus on setting strategic objectives, before beginning to measure.

(B) Stuart echos the controversy over SMART objectives by pointing out How Being SMART Isn’t Always the Right Objective.  He believes that SMART fails the what’s-in-it-for-me test and suggest that we look at the problem from a different lens, aka a PRISM.

PRISM is an acronym for Personal, Realistic, Interesting, Specific and Measurable.

I worry that Personal will feel disconnected from the greater good and lead to increased lack of alignment.

(C) Suresh worries about metrics without management and tells how Trent Limited, the retail arm of the Tata Group, used the Balanced Scorecard to sustain dramatic performance increases over long periods of time.

If you want to reap real benefits from BSC, be prepared for the long haul. If you are looking for an organizational “ruler” – an instrument for one-time measurement – maybe you should look elsewhere.

All very interesting but I think that management without measurement can be useful.  Ask Sarasota County.