by Phil Jones | 10 May, 2010 | Avoiding communication mistakes, Communicating bad news
Listen out for how people explain problems and faliures. Do they say: “It was the weather. We had a wet summer and numbers were down” “There were roadworks outside the shop for 6 weeks and that discouraged people from visiting” “The...
by Phil Jones | Updated 20 Oct, 2017 | Strategy communication
Working with a Chief Executive last year, he was frustrated that his staff were not following basic practices of timesheets, project reporting and being disciplined. It was hard to get consistent information from them on the various IT projects that were running. Now...
by Phil Jones | Updated 15 Feb, 2018 | Balanced Scorecard Design Principles
I sometimes get asked “How do you draw a strategy map on a page for a whole organisation?” The answer is you don’t do a balanced scorecard for a whole organisation. The answer is the same as for the question, “How do you limit a balanced scorecard to 24 measures?”...
by Phil Jones | Updated 18 Jul, 2018 | KPI & measure design
Why do we use objectives before measures? Because it makes it easier to refine and revise measures. What happens is we have measures but no objectives? In the absence of objectives, people designing performance management systems often compensate for problems with...
by Phil Jones | Updated 15 Feb, 2018 | Balanced Scorecard Design Principles, KPI & measure design
Why should a balanced scorecard have objectives as well as measures? Developing objectives before measures prevents premature measure design. This is the tendency for people to leap straight to measures instead of defining more clearly what they want to measure. If...
by Phil Jones | Updated 29 Oct, 2018 | Culture of performance, KPI & measure design
One of the underlying causes of the dysfunctional behaviour sometimes experienced in performance management is where individual measures and targets look at only specific parts of a problem.As a result are asked to achieve targets that are locally optimal, but...
by Phil Jones | Updated 19 Feb, 2018 | Strategy implementation
Are your people polishing strategy, instead of implementing it? In our organisation people have big brains – and that can be a problem! Listening to a Chief Executive talk to her the team about the strategy, I was struck by a phrase she used multiple times in...
by Phil Jones | Updated 15 Feb, 2018 | Modern Balanced Scorecards
John Kay the economist posted an article about the value Balanced Scorecard in business. In life, and business, we should judge ourselves by a balanced scorecard. Among the management fads and fashions of the last twenty years, the balanced score card is one that...
by Phil Jones | Updated 15 Feb, 2018 | Balanced Scorecard Perspectives
Reading reviews of John Kay’s latest book Obliquity, they bring out how the theme of the book is that route to success is often through the search for something else: Taking the oblique route. It is a paradox, he says, that to achieve objectives you are better...
