Page 12 - Performance Leadership

INTRODUCTION

hy do so many balanced scorecard projects fail? Why are there
Ware so many political budget games? Why are most performance
management implementations tactical and fragmented of nature, and
why do managers not see the big picture? How come managers treat
information as a source of power to be protected, instead of an asset to
be exploited? Why do managers still ask for better information when
there are thousands of reports available?
As a systems implementation consultant, project manager, manage-
ment consultant, manager, research analyst, and strategist, I have spent
all of my working life asking myself those very same questions many
times. For a long time, I thought the answer was “politics” and “bad
people” displaying opportunistic behavior or simply not understanding
what was good for them. It has only been in the past several years that
I have come to understand that it’s not bad people, but rather bad man-
agement information and bad management processes that drive the
bad, or at least immature, behaviors. This leads to the next logical ques-
tion, what is a better way of managing performance?
Most of the literature, papers, and field experiences describe “best
practices” by stating how things are, rather than by asking how perform-
ance could be, or even should be. In my quest I have chosen to chal-
lenge these best practices by using a simple philosophy: Every best
practice has a dominant disadvantage. If we turn the best practice
around into the opposite approach, the opposite approach obviously has
a dominant disadvantage as well. If this new, opposite disadvantage is
less of a disadvantage, we win something—a better way of doing things.
And if it turns out to be an even bigger disadvantage, we win again; we
have confirmed the best practice. Let’s use an example: One best prac-
tice states that every performance indicator should have a single owner

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