Page 14 - Performance Leadership

Introduction • 3

goals and objectives live at odds with one another. Shareholders want
the highest possible shareholder value; employees look for job security
and a place to build their skills and make a career; customers want a
good price and a decent product or service; and suppliers want to sell
as much as they can. In the hierarchy, we don’t really recognize that.
There is vertical alignment, we all report up, and goals and objectives
are cascaded down. We don’t really know what our stakeholders
require, nor does the hierarchy really invite us to care.
I have adopted what I think is a better definition of what constitutes
an organization: An organization is a unique collaboration of stakehold-
ers by which organizations each reach goals and objectives that none
of them could have reached by themselves. The trick to performance
management is not to align everyone to the same goals and objectives,
but in finding ways to bridge conflicting goals and objectives. Taking
this approach leads to subtly different and sometimes entirely different
views on performance management. It has been my intention to make
performance management work better. I have aimed to broaden the
horizon of performance management and introduce new points of
view. I hope that these new—and sometimes opposite—points of view
make you think and challenge your assumptions. Best practices are a
starting point; success starts when you try to apply them in your own
world, in your own way, with your own original solutions. To get an
overview on the established best practices, this book should be read in
combination with books on the balanced scorecard, budgeting, strat-
egy implementation, management control, business intelligence, and
other related topics.