Beyond Performance Management: Why, When, and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance

Written by Jeremy Hope and Steve Player

Narrated by Mike Chamberlain

There's a bewildering array of management tools out there. And they all promise to help you excel at the toughest parts of your job: defining your organization's strategic direction, managing customers and costs, and boosting workforce performance. But just 30 percent of these tools deliver as intended. Why? As Jeremy Hope and Steve Player reveal in Beyond Performance Management, while many tools are sound in theory, they're misused by most organizations. For example, executives buy and implement a tool without first asking, "What problem are we trying to solve?" And they use tools to command and control frontline teams, not empower them-a serious and costly mistake.

In this eminently useful, clear-eyed book, the authors critically review dozens of well-known management tools-from mission statements, balanced scorecards, and rolling forecasts to key performance indicators, Six Sigma, and performance appraisals. They explain how to select the right tools for your organization, how to implement them correctly, and how to extract maximum value from each.

Brimming with rigorous analysis and solid advice, Beyond Performance Management helps you swiftly gauge the value of each management tool, as well as navigate the increasingly crowded field of offerings-so the tools you select deliver fully on their promise.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ascent Audio
• Release date: Nov 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469081618

Reviews for Beyond Performance Management

[keylawk · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Jeremy Hope and Steve Player provide a critique of modern business management tools and how we use them. For example, "key performance indicators", "balanced score card", "customer relation dynamics", and resource management. They flatly state that business tools are rarely used effectively, rarely yielding results more than 30% of the time, and sometimes taking companies into reverse. Most companies simply fail to recognize what their most valuable resources are. Invariably, "budget controls" reinforce bureaucracy at the expense of flexibility. The CFO and corporate finance department become siloed and isolated from the rest of the business. In this book, Hope and Player look at 40 of the most familiar management tools, and carefully examine their origins and purpose. And the heart of this examination are notes on how each can best be used in practice. The orientation turns on people-centered approach: "who is using the tool"?So often, when a tool is not working, a manager will blame the tool. However, the authors suggest that it is often the case that the tool is simply not pushed or applied. For example, "open book management" relies on transparency, and its adoption across the company. It is easy to pay lip service to "sharing of knowledge". In practice, however, key managers may seek out and cling to a bottle-neck, preserving a fiefdom for themselves under the illusion of attaining privilege and security. Similarly, many managers reinforce a command-and-control mentality, which remains the dominant ethos in many workplaces in spite of talk about the benefits of a "free market". Managers seem to hold a belief about the robust productivity of individual freedom in a governmental setting, without seeing that the benefits accrue in any "corporate" setting. The authors note that "courage is in short supply". The authors providing an unsparing critique of American business managers. The failure of executives and directors to appreciate the value of their own personnel is fatal to growth and business health. To this day, most businesses continue to sacrifice long-term profits for short-term cost-cutting without careful examination of the skills and relationships of the people--the power of a focused work force is etiolated by misdirected and blind greed in the Executive Suite.