My Hub History of Activity

Just had to post this quote from Patrick Hoverstadt’s book, “The Fractal Organization� on performance related pay. I think it is so true, especially who he says will win.

The challenge for this project is “getting things to add up�. It is relatively easy to produce measurements. We measure lots of things and can group them into the four quadrants of the balanced scorecard, but what does it mean?

Well folks on Friday, my last day in the office for 2007, I sent the two levels of management above me and one manager above and to the left, a flash demo of the reporting that we have created. The objective is to gain executive sponsorship to bring our project into the mainstream and become the reporting scorecard the division uses.

What has become apparent is that many different departments are collecting data and producing reports but this information doesn’t naturally lead to specific actions. For example a decrease in customer satisfaction rating or an increase in errors in orders doesn’t immediately tell us why this is happening, which areas are causing it and what are the immediate steps we can take.

We have been staring at the data we have collected trying to make sense of it all and finally this week it looks like an approach is forming. This approach was sparked off by some ideas in a book I picked up called Freakonomics by Steven Levitt (Economist) & Stephen Dubner(Writer). In Freakonomics the authors explore questions like do school teachers help their students cheat on exams and do real estate agents sell their own houses for a higher price than they do for their clients.