Make Success Measurable!: A Mindbook-Workbook for Setting Goals and Taking Action (Hardcover)

by Douglas K. Smith (Author) "Performance begins with focusing on outcomes instead of activities..." (more)
Key Phrases: make success measurable, working group discipline, arena mapping, Pick Relevant Metrics, Coordinate Your Goals, Goals of Others (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
"Performance begins with focusing on outcomes instead of activities. In my experience, most people in most organizations most of the time do the reverse. They concentrate their efforts on the pursuit of activities instead of outcomes. As a result, they rarely set or achieve performance results that matter."

Today's performance challenges demand outcomes—both financial and nonfinancial—that must simultaneously benefit customers, shareholders, employees, and management. Therein lies a cycle of sustainable performance that functions as a framework to ensure your organization's goals are set, met, and balanced for today's business world.

Make Success Measurable! enables you to avoid activity-based goals that can go on indefinitely, and articulate aggressive outcome-based goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

This is a how-to book, emphasizing outcomes as opposed to actions in setting goals. You'll learn how to: Set goals that matter to customers, shareholders, and funders. Set nonfinancial as well as financial goals and link them together. Understand and use outcome-based goals that support success while avoiding activity-based goals that produce failure. Select and use management disciplines needed to achieve your goals. Smith provides the what's and why's behind today's performance challenges and shows how to convert them into measurable concrete achievements.

Using an innovative approach, Smith divides each chapter into an explanatory Mindbook section and a practice Workbook section. The Mindbook sections provide descriptions and explain key concepts, frameworks, tools, and techniques. They seek to build your intellectual understanding of how to set and achieve the performance goals that matter.

The Workbook sections include detailed examples and exercises that you and your colleagues can use to practice the concepts, tools, and techniques put forth in the Mindbook section. Workbook exercises allow you to convert understanding into action—and action into results! "Doug Smith's work on performance and measurement has been an invaluable management resource for us. We believe that if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Thanks to Doug, we can focus on the right measures to drive performance against today's many new and different challenges throughout our enterprise."—Leon Gorman, President, L.L. Bean, Inc.

"Make Success Measurable! is a practical and powerful step-by-step guide to setting and achieving the goals we all need to accomplish in a constantly changing and challenging world."—Charles Dolan, Chairman, Cablevision Systems Corporation.

"No one writes as clearly about today's key management issues as Doug Smith. Whether you're in a small eCommerce startup or a large, already established organization, the frameworks, tools, techniques, and exercises contained in this book are the only things you'll need to manage the performance that matters to your customers, your people, and your shareholders."—Steve Goldstein, CEO, eChores and former CEO, American Express Bank.

"Achieving results that matter—to donors and clients—is the true measure of success for any nonprofit organization. This book provides a thoughtful and extremely practical guide for setting goals and effectively meeting them. It is an absolutely indispensable tool for leaders and a model for good management."—Jenna Dorn, President, National Museum of Health.

From the Inside Flap
"Performance begins with focusing on outcomes instead of activities. In my experience, most people in most organizations most of the time do the reverse. They concentrate their efforts on the pursuit of activities instead of outcomes. As a result, they rarely set or achieve performance results that matter." Today’s performance challenges demand outcomes—both financial and nonfinancial—that must simultaneously benefit customers, shareholders, employees, and management. Therein lies a cycle of sustainable performance that functions as a framework to ensure your organization’s goals are set, met, and balanced for today’s business world. Make Success Measurable! enables you to avoid activity-based goals that can go on indefinitely, and articulate aggressive outcome-based goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This is a how-to book, emphasizing out-comes as opposed to actions in setting goals. You’ll learn how to:

Set goals that matter to customers, share-holders, and funders

Set nonfinancial as well as financial goals and link them together

Understand and use outcome-based goals that support success while avoiding activity-based goals that produce failure

Select and use management disciplines needed to achieve your goalsSmith provides the what’s and why’s behind today’s performance challenges and shows how to convert them into measurable concrete achievements. Using an innovative approach, Smith divides each chapter into an explanatory Mindbook section and a practice Workbook section. The Mindbook sections provide descriptions and explain key concepts, frameworks, tools, and techniques. They seek to build your intellectual understanding of how to set and achieve the performance goals that matter. The Workbook sections include detailed examples and exercises that you and your colleagues can use to practice the concepts, tools, and techniques put forth in the Mindbook section. Workbook exercises allow you to convert understanding into action—and action into results!

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (February 26, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471295590
• ISBN-13: 978-0471295594
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49,794 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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  #2 in	Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Systems Analysis
  #27 in	Books > Business & Investing > Management & Leadership > Total Quality Management
  #29 in	Books > Reference > Business Skills > Business Math

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Learn How to be SMART, October 4, 2000

By	Debbie Hoxit (Tacoma, WA USA) - See all my reviews

You can rarely pick up a job description in the public or private sector that does not include a statement seeking "demonstrated experience and success working with the principles of quality management and a commitment to customer service." One of the cornerstones to quality management is the ability to focus on outcomes instead of activities.

Make Success Measurable is filled with practical techniques. Even more, it is a workbook, providing opportunities to apply new concepts to real work. Whether you want to be able to create more focus within your own work unit, be able to demonstrate tangible results to your manager, prioritize your own work by aligning your day to day activities with the most important initiatives, or coach customers who are seeking your expertise in developing performance measures, this book can help.

As a result of reading this book and trying the exercises, you should be able to:

1) Convert new visions, strategies, and directions into achievable outcome-based goals that can better yourself and others in your organization.

2) Set goals that are specific, measurable, aggressive, achievable, relevant, and time bound. (SMART Goals)

3) Set goals that matter to those expecting a return on their funding dollars.

4) Set goals that matter to you personally in terms of opportunities, rewards, and skills.

5) Choose from a variety of management disciplines to achieve your goals.

6) Set goals that matter to customers who want speed, quality, and prompt service.

30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ten Management Principles for Leading Change, June 5, 2000

By	Turgay BUGDACIGIL (Istanbul, Turkey) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

"I believe you will benefit from this book because the challenge of setting and achieving performance goals has become very confusing". Douglas K. Smith writes, "It has been more than 30 years since Peter Drucker wrote about the importance of managing for results. His work led to the widespread practice of management by objective. But an awful lot has happened in the past 30 years. The world of business and organizations has changed dramatically, turning many of Drucker's specifics (though not his wisdom) upside down. In the aftermath of total quality, customer service, time-based competition, strategic alliances, globalization, reengineering, core competencies, continuous improvement, innovation, teams, horizontal organization, benchmarking, best place to work, information technology, diversity, environmentalism, deregulation and reregulation, eCommerce, and privatization, those of us left standing in today's organizations are unsure about what performance goals and outcomes make the most difference and why. We know that setting performance goals is key to managing ourselves and others, but we no longer know how".

Douglas K. Smith organizes his book in four parts. In the first part (Chapters 1-4), he provides the background, concepts, tools, techniques, and frameworks you need to set specific outcome-based goals that matter to successfully navigate today's most pressing performance challenges. In the second part (Chapters 5-7), he focuses on helping you align and coordinate goals throughout your organization. In the third part (Chapters 8-10), he describes the management disciplines you need to achieve your goals and how to make choices among them. In the fourth part (Chapter 11), he concludes the book with a step-by-step design for building an outcomes management system in your organization.

In this context, in Chapter 10, he reviews the management disciplines you must understand in order to succeed in the face of change, and introduces the critical distinction between decision-diven change and behavior-driven change, and describes how to manage each successfully. Hence, he argues that most change efforts fall far short of their potential. Usually that's because leaders fail to address the deep behavioral changes they are seeking. And thus, he lists the following ten management principles as the heart of any successful change effort:

1. Keep performance results the primary objective of behavior and skill change.

2. Continually increase the number of individuals taking responsibility for their own change.

3. Make sure that each person always knows why his or her performance and change matters to the purpose and results of the whole organization.

4. Put people in a position to learn by doing and provide them with the information and support they need just in time to perform.

5. Embrace improvisation as the best path to both performance and change.

6. Use team performance to drive change whenever demanded.

7. Concentrate organizational designs on the work that people do, not on the decision-making authority they have.

8. Create and focus energy and meaningful language because these are the scarcest resources during periods of change.

9. Stimulate and sustain behavior-driven change by harmonizing initiatives throughout the organization.

10. Practice leadership based on the courage to live the change you wish to bring about.

Finally, he argues that if you expect others to change their behavior, you have to change yours. It's as simple and as hard as that.

I strongly recommend.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Read this book and apply its lessons, March 3, 1999

By A Customer

Make Success Measurable tells you how to set business goals that matter for shareholders, customers, and employees. That is good advice, and it is backed up by "workbook" exercises that help you focus on what is really important. The "mindbook-workbook" format makes room for exercises that you can work on with your colleagues at the office. I found that the "mindbook" portion held my interest as an individual reader. I started getting REALLY interested about halfway through the book when Smith introduced the concept of "working arenas" - the different groupings of people (sometimes in multiple companies) that are necessary to achieve these goals. Smith explains that you need to shape your goals and methods to fit the appropriate working arena, rather than a pre-set corporate structure. If you work in a complex organization, you should read this book and apply its lessons.

I would compare Make Success Measurable very favorably to the Kaplan and Norton book on The Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard tends to be vague and anecdotal on the subject of how to set measurable goals, and it is hard to finish. In contrast, Smith packs his book with original analysis and specific recommendations on topics like "Vertical versus Horizontal Management Disciplines" and "Injecting Creative and Personal Tension into Goals". The Balanced Scorecard presents a four way cause and effect chain from employees through process improvements, customers, and shareholders. Make Success Measurable presents a three way performance cycle as including employees who provide value to customers who provide rewards to shareholders...who provide rewards to employees and so on. The "process" piece doesn't appear in Smith's analysis, because focusing on process measures doesn't necessarily help anyone. In fact, it is a trap that can lead to meaningless work. Smith encourages us to focus on "outcomes" - measures that matter directly to employees, customers, and shareholders. This brings us quickly to reality and hopefully to consensus with our colleagues. Get real. Get this book.