Page 13 - Performance Leadership

2 • Introduction

who is accountable for the results. The dominant disadvantage is sub-
optimal results. Managers optimize the resources at their disposal to
maximize the output on their performance indicators only. Now let’s
examine what happens if some key performance indicators are owned
by two owners. The advantage is that they are driven toward collabora-
tion, as neither manager can make the goals without the help of the
other. The disadvantage, however, is that shared responsibility is no
responsibility. If we can address that problem (and I will show you we
can), we have won something.
Writing a book, as the adage goes, is a journey. In my quest to iden-
tify and challenge the best practices in performance management, in
order to come up with the “next practices,” I have explored many ter-
ritories. I’ve relied on my nearly 20 years of experience in a variety of
roles, discussions with hundreds of organizations, and countless hours
of study. The journey has taken me through various areas of strategy
management, through transaction cost economics, corporate social
responsibility, organizational behavior, intercultural management, serv-
ice level management, corporate communication, social psychology,
discussions around shareholder versus stakeholder orientation, practi-
cal problems around “one version of the truth,” and various hypes, such
as “real-time management information.”
Many of these areas provided interesting viewpoints leading to
answers—and more important—to new, more basic questions. Toward
the end of the process of writing this book, I came to explore one of
the most foundational questions: what’s an organization? We discuss
this question in business school, but only now did the full gravity of the
question dawn on me. Choosing how to answer this question drives the
complete business model. Most people I asked, and most sources I
referred to, define an organization similarly as “a group of people that
share the same goals and objectives.”
I have come to think that this answer actually is the reason for many
of the problems with performance management—the reason behind
why so many initiatives fail; why there are so many political games; and
why there are so many fragmented projects. Working with this defini-
tion of an organization, leads you to think that stakeholders all share a
set of central goals and objectives, and can be aligned in this direction.
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, many of the