How many times have I seen this before?  No names of course.

The irony of this cartoon is that the "employee" may in fact be correct.  Granted that a revenue chart with this kind of drastic drop-off can't be good, we too often pay these one-dimensional measurements too much attention.

It is like the analogy of the airline pilot sitting behind his cockpit dashboard with all but the altimeter covered up.  When asked by a (nervous) passenger, he responded, "Oh that?  This week I'm really concentrating on managing my altitude better... next week I'll work on airspeed".

How many times have you seen organizations look myopically at a single indicator, often inciting drastic management decisions and policies? 

Organizations in today's competitive environment need a much more balanced view of their corporate health, taking things like customer perspective, internal processes and knowledge/skills and abilities development into consideration with financial indicators.  Sound familiar?  This is exactly the approach taken by The Balanced Scorecard, which has unfortunately of late, been associated more with software vendors (and their management dashboards) than then original methodology written by Robert Kaplan and David Norton more than fifteen years ago.

(Cartoon Courtesy Charlos' Toons @ www.CharlosToons.com ... NOT used by permission (yet), but I hope it's okay!  By the way Charlos, you should consider creating an RSS feed to further syndicate your work on the web.  I see this cartoon via The Vancouver Sun, but taking a page from Dilbert the reach you can get from a web-based syndication (RSS) will soon far surpass the success of the newspaper syndication.)

The field of Performance Management is increasing in scope, coverage and every day.  How do I know this?  Because there are more "Performance Management" consultants today than ever... and they bill a truckload to improve the performance of their clientele.

Further to that, Performance Management is now considered a sub-set of Business Intelligence (at least according to the large BI software vendors... add another truckload of costs).

We see Performance, within the context of organizational performance, being defined as the "achievement of results", but what does that really mean?

To use a sports analogy, when is the last time the general manager of a baseball team cared that his clean-up hitter hit .500, if it was for a losing cause?  The batter achieved great results by any measure, but how closely do those results contribute to the immediate success of the team?

Performance Management is as much about the alignment of measurement, as the measurement itself.

By that I mean that sometimes what we measure is more important than the results of a given measure.  I'll give you an example:

Some of the top measurements reported in publicly traded organizations today is revenue.  Let's assume for a moment that revenue is a standard measure, that can't be "fudged" (I know: that's a bit of a stretch).  If an organization reports year-over-year increases in revenue of 23% the market applauds.  But what does this really mean in terms of organizational health?  Why isn't the 13 point loss of market share more interesting, or the 4% decrease in cashflow year-over-year, or the 18% increase in employee turnover?

The fact is that performance metrics or measurements without context and analysis are just statistics.  But the analysis I speak of isn't the domain of rocket science or nuclear physics, but rather a blend of common sense and strategy alignment.

(Photo by kiwêhowin via Flickr)