Eugene Taurman wrote: "Your company rewarded for following a process. It
is most important to reward results and they must be the right results."
There is an extremely thought-provoking interview in the current issue of
Fortune (pp. 98-99 of the International edition) with Anthony Rucci,
effectively "Chief Learning Officer" of Sears. In it he makes the point
that financial performance is a lagging indicator of organisational
effectiveness. As he rightly says "by the time your company publishes its
annual report, it's too late to do anything about it."
This strongly reinforces my experience in helping organisations develop
systems to measure strategic performance. One of the the main reasons
that good strategies fail is that they are not properly measured. One of
the main reasons they are not properly measured is that organisations are
inclined to measure too late, after the fact, rather than while the
strategy is being executed. Also, while outputs (results) are measured,
inputs (processes) rarely are.
Sears has developed a means for identifying and measuring the critical
inputs to the execution of its key strategy, virtually as they occur. Are
these inputs (e.g. employee attitudes, customer perception) "processes" or
a "results?" Both, probably. What is important, however, is that even if
they are "results" they are ones which are not normally tracked, or if
tracked, not properly integrated into the compensation and other reward
systems of the organisation. Sears is apparently doing both.
Cheers
Richard
--Richard Goodale <fc45@dial.pipex.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>