Performance : Creating the Performance-Driven Organization [Hardcover]

Mark A. Stiffler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

A unified approach to performance management that integrates organization and employee performance

Performance provides a practical framework for rethinking what performance management is and how it can be used to better execute strategy. It clearly presents a unified approach for aligning, measuring, rewarding, reporting, and analyzing the performance of an organization and its people that enables executives and managers to move beyond today’s incomplete and fragmented approach to performance management. Featuring real-world illustrations and intuitive, practical, and actionable steps to creating a performance-driven organization, this essential guide will fundamentally change how you think about your organization’s performance.

From the Inside Flap

How Do You Define Performance Management?

Balanced scorecard. Six Sigma. Dashboards. Employee evaluations. Incentive compensation. Financial reporting. Performance management means different things to different organizations. Most for-profit businesses, not-for-profit associations, and government entities agree that managing performance is an obvious factor in the success of their organization. But investing your organization's time and resources in a single methodology, however effective, addresses only one piece of the performance management puzzle and fails to motivate the entire workforce—all employees, partners, suppliers, and agents—towards full implementation of the organization's strategy.

PERFORMANCE: Creating the Performance-Driven Organization lays out a comprehensive methodology for achieving a best-in-class performance management system, one that unites all aspects of your organization into a single, interlocking "performance network." The result? Employees become focused on productively and efficiently executing your organization's strategy, resulting in a sustained competitive advantage that drives revenue, cuts costs, and improves profits.

Reading this groundbreaking book will fundamentally change how you think about executing strategy. It outlines a unified approach to performance management that will show you how to:

• Align the objectives, resources, and budgets of the different parts of the organization with the goals, opportunities, and quotas of individuals
• Measure organizational and individual performance
• Reward individuals for performance
• Report organizational and individual performance
• Analyze organizational and individual strategy execution using models and analytics

Out of this model come the building blocks that will show you how to define strategic objectives for the organization, set workforce production quotas, link objectives and resources to budgets, manage workforce competencies and training, and much more.

A consultant to GE, Carl Zeiss, Cigna, Sankyo, Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth, and other Forbes Global 2000 companies, author Mark A. Stiffler draws from his vast experience to equip you with ideas that work in the real world and are supported by real-world examples. He uses case studies and examples of what it takes to build a successful organization to show you how to apply the building blocks of performance management to improve your organization's performance.

Whether you are a CEO, senior executive, board member, or manager; responsible for the whole organization, a business unit, or a department; in sales/marketing, human resources, information technology, or finance,

PERFORMANCE gives you a useful tool and the understanding of how to use it to approach performance management as a dynamic, forward-looking process.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 224 pages
• Publisher: Wiley (March 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471732729
• ISBN-13: 978-0471732723
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,093,691 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Nothing new here, March 27, 2006

By	Samantha K. - See all my reviews

There's nothing new here. The author just rehashes a lot of old and outdated advice about how to get more work out of your labour pool. Unless you are willing to accept 20 or 30 percent employee turnover per annum (and the author completely ignores the costs of turnover), none of these ideas will actually work in the long term for your company.

Yes, it is true that this book is reasonably well written and has pretty charts/graphics, etc. But, the real issue is that most of that "well written" information is based on some seriously flawed assumptions.

We've tried using incentive management to drive performance at our company and I've talked to people at other companies who have tried it, and it seems that the effects are temporary at best. You can fool some of your employees all of the time, or all of your employees some of the time, but you CANNOT fool ALL of the employees ALL of the time.

If you have this book I'd strongly recommend that you look at the flaws in the underlying concepts. Also, try reading a little bit more. Look at "The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First" by Jeffrey Pfeffer (Stanford Business School), and "Why Incentive Plans Cannot Work" by Alfie Kohn (Harvard Business Review).

If you don't have this book, don't waste your money buying it. But you still should look at the two books I mention above.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars More garbage..., January 29, 2007

By	xS7 "xS7" (Amherst, Mass) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Performance : Creating the Performance-Driven Organization (Hardcover)

...from the CEO of yet another "Toxic Company".

I bought this book from another bookseller as a closeout clearance book (for less than five dollars), and I think I paid too much!!

Overall the book's writing stlye is disjointed, as if it was made up of a collection of other articles and websites, rather written as a book.

As for the content: I'll borrow what another reviewer had to say, it's the obvious and the wrong. If you know anything about business, you don't need this book, because most of it is common knowledge. The rest of it is just plain wrong!

You'd be better off reading Storey's Guide to Raising Pigs: Care/Facilities/Management/Breed Selection.

10 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Don't waste your time, March 31, 2006

By	Marc S. (Morristown, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Performance : Creating the Performance-Driven Organization (Hardcover)

The only information in this book is the 'obvious' and the 'wrong'. For instance the author's insistence on his framework for performance (align, measure, reward, report, analyze):

ALIGN: Kinda, obvious isn't it. There's no point in having duplicate departments or wasted efforts. Most businesses have gotten this problem solved at the Business Plan level.

MEASURE: Dead wrong. There's no quicker way to kill morale than micromanaging employees down to the level of how long it takes them to answer the phone. Besides why are you wasting money employing people to "measure" your other employees?

REWARD: "Pay for Performance"- Perhaps the worst idea in American Business since "New COKE". Good employees won't be motivated by extra money (sure they'll like it, but they'd do a good job without it). So the only thing this does is create a whole new crop of mercenary employees.

REPORT: Because how else can you justify all that money you wasted on MEASURING. Besides nothing builds a team like telling them how they are different from their co-workers, right? WRONG!

ANALYZE: Because those mercenary employees are really only interested in the money, so you have to tell them what the report means!!

This book is bad ideas followed by worse ideas. Who edited this thing anyways??