Customer Reviews

Performance Scorecards: Measuring the Right Things in the Real World

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've never read a better, more concise explanation of a beginning-to-beginning performance evaluation and management system. In fact, I surprised myself by getting a little wrapped up in the storyline of the fictional case study being used to illustrate the steps in the process.

"Page-turner" isn't a term usually applied to management books, but this one almost deserves it. The actual "story" itself is sometimes almost painful as fiction -- I really wish the authors had consulted a dialogue editor -- but the story acts as a thread to connect the key elements and illustrate some of the issues faced when building performance management systems.

The authors' thesis is that executives and managers spend too much time tracking too many performance indicators, often focusing time on unimportant measures or indicators outside their scope of control. Front-line employees and supervisors are uncertain what they're being measured against, and feel they are powerless to influence quality or efficiency.

The performance scorecards approach can be initiated at any management level. Through a series of data collection and staff meetings, goals, objectives, indicators, and responsibilities can be agreed upon. Each manager, project, and even many employees can have "scorecards" that interlock with everyone else's in the organization, reflecting the interdependencies required for organizational success.

There are six key steps in performance scorecards: Collect, Create, Cultivate, Cascade, Connect, and Confirm.

There are strong team-building aspects to this model. Not only does it stress interdependence, it also fosters decentralization of responsibility, authority, and accountability. Further, it encourages openness about results and how they are expressed and communicated.

The process does depend on a quantitative as well as qualitative expression of indicators and results. This may scare off some service organizations. However, the team-based, consensus approach to determining a way to translate the qualitative to the quantitative minimizes the friction and suspicions of "unfairness" in the process.

The process allows no wiggle room for the employee who says that a particular objective or outcome is not measurable. If it's not measurable, then it shouldn't be an objective, according to the authors.

The authors are consultants, and they stress the importance of a trained facilitator as part of the process. The investment is well worth the outcomes in employee morale as well as productivity and success in fulfilling a mission and being able to demonstrate it. The book contains numerous illustrations, figures, and a few tools to help the narrative explanation of the process.

"Performance Scorecards" is a book about performance measurement. The book follows the management team of a fictitious company and their first attempt at developing a performance measurement system. It is written in an engaging style. The reader gets to listen in on conversations at the management team's meetings and even gets to see how the group visually displays their results. Along the way, the authors include a number of helpful illustrations and surveys. In addition, each chapter concludes with a brief case study of a real company.

As a seasoned manager, I initially thought this book was too basic for me. The content seemed appropriate for new managers or companies new to performance measurement. By the end of the book, however, I changed my mind and would recommend "Performance Scorecards" to anyone. I found a number of valuable ideas and because measuring the right stuff is so important, a few valuable ideas can be very powerful. The importance of the topic, combined with the fact the book is a quick and interesting read, makes "Performance Scorecards" an excellent choice for most managers.

Outstanding summarizes this book very well! Richard and Mark have a very common sense yet powerful approach in helping organizations link their strategies, processes and people together. This book is very easy to read and difficult to put down. They explain their methodology through the use of an example in which an organization implements the scorecards, walking the reader through each of the six steps in scorecard development. I wish business leaders would read and implement this type of a system, forcing them to look closer at their processes and people and how they tie together to impact business performance. Highly recommend this to anyone for use in business, but could even be applied very well to one's personal life. Thanks guys!!

I am highly impressed with this outstanding book on Performance Scorecards. It is the best book which I have read on performance management and scorecards and is written in a clear style with no buzzwords. This book will be useful for any company which wants to implement a scorecard system in their organisation since it gives a detailed case study of how to implement the concept of a scorecard in a hypothetical company.

Brilliant and Outstanding. I wish more books were written in a clear style as this one. There are no detailed academic theoretical concepts which do not make sense. Just a large dose of practical and useful ideas which will improve the performace of your business.

The various perspectives of the scorecard allow you to apply measurement to the critical areas of your business performance. We curently use the scorecard in our business and the application of it forces you to ask probing questions and to measure the right things. Richard and Mark, both of whom have helped us design our scorecard, are experts in this area. Their book avoids the all-too-prevalent techno-jargon and leads the reader on an everyday experience we can all identify with. I don't remember the last time I read and learned a measurement tool that actually left me feeling entertained! A great read!

"Performance Scorecards" describes the process by which a fictional large company studies and then improves their system of performance measurement. The company already collects dozens of measurements, so the key challenge is to identify the most important and coordinate the process between departments and up and down the corporate ladder. The hero of this process is "Bob" a consultant who acts as facilitator. After reading this book I think most senior managers would be reluctant to tackle the process without a consultant like Bob. The authors are consultants and I would guess that they wrote this book mainly as a way to get new business.

As president of a company with just 17 employees, I was hoping for something simpler and more concrete. I need a list of useful performance indicators, with tips on how to measure them. This book didn't offer that.

I cannot recommend the book for a small organization. I give the book two stars, instead of one star, because it could be useful to a senior manager in a large company who is contemplating hiring a consultant to help overhaul the company's performance measurement system. The authors might be just the consultants you need.

This book acomplishes very well the task of "evangelizing" the use of Performance Scorecard in businesses.
The author used a similar to real life story, to illustrate the concepts behind implementing a Performance Scorecard in a department or division of a fictional company.
The story is well crafted and the reading is smooth and interesting. Tipically you will read in hours. It is a beginners book on the subject.

One point I would make concerning the subject encompassed in this book. The authors use as example a fictional company that already identified well it's mission and strategies, everybody in each position knows well what to do, what they don't know is how to organize their information so as to measure their performance. These definitions are typically the most difficult to make and are at the core of the business problem that may have to be attacked when implementing a Performance Scorecard. These definitions usually are obtained after the company have adopted a formal business strategy and revised it's processes. I think the authors might in the future add some explanation on these topics.

What I like most about this little book is the simplicity and lucidity with which it demonstrates what performance measurement is fundamentally about. Embedded within a fictional but entirely realistic story about one company's discovery of performance measurement, is a straightforward methodology for designing and implementing a performance measurement system. Largely based around the principles of international business excellence models like the Baldrige Framework and the Australian Business Excellence Framework, the book captures some of the more important ideas of effective performance measurement, like linking measures to strategy and to each level of decision making in the organisation, involving people, focusing on trends and using them to make decisions.

It's audience is really those people starting out on their performance measurement journey, and doesn't address the more difficult and detailed aspects that those further along the journey typically struggle with, like more specific approaches to designing measures than brainstorming, the design of cost-effective collection of performance data, the most meaningful analysis and reporting of the data. But it sure does lay the right kind of foundation for a sophisticated organisational performance measurement system. This book is on my list of favourites for this topic.