Never mind the little chatter ( none of which is off the cuff) that comes out of their mouths. What is really going on . What are the real concerns and area of focus ? That is other than getting into power – to be in the real position to effect change towards what they feel is “right ” “proper” or to drive that big new Cadillac perk – never mind that the vehicle of choice has now moved on to new models and types. So much for progressive proactive thinking. Its all still way back there in the “stone age”.

As an example and case in point one manager went on at great lengths regarding a discussion he had with a novice , and still relatively untouched , marketing type. The conversation was about the skills – or better simply put coercive management skills of Atilla the Hun. Atilla was widely successful in conquering and tormenting vast areas of geography. He was known as the evil Rasputin of his day. Still he not only was successful , he was an effective manner of men. Atilla did not do the work himself but by command of the troops. The summary of Atilla’s management style was that troops showed loyalty to Atilla and Atilla rewarded the troops.   It all depends which side of the fence or side you are on .     Good and evil is only subjective.  If you are on Atilla’s side the rape and pillage and rewards would be great.  If on the other side of the victims’  then not so good.  The message to any listeners was ” I am a bastard ” but if you show loyalty to me and my projects I will reward you greatly. “Get with the program”

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“We know”- translation – you don’t – or better yet we have the perks and you don’t

Perks of management can often be best described as luxuries given to management that the firm cannot rationalize – “Its a perk of management”
Fine I guess it the business / organization / company was prospering.

Yet its not – its as if more management is needed to parcel out and control the limited resources now available

All the while shepherding resources to retain the “Perks of Management”
Another clear example of management by Dilbert :

While most people don’t distinguish between goals and objectives in every day conversation, I find that performance management practitioners sometimes use the word goal when they really mean target. This potential confusion between objectives and targets explains why I usually recommend against using the term goal when establishing a standard performance management terminology.

From my point of view, objectives, KPIs, and targets are related, but distinct, items:

An objective describes what you want to accomplish.

A key performance indicator (KPI) monitors progress towards a specific objective.

A target is the value of a KPI a defined moment in time.

As always, a simple example is useful. Imagine a runner who has entered a marathon with the objective to win the race. On the surface, accomplishing that objective is binary – the runner either does or doesn’t win the race. However, to better understand the runner’s performance, we can create the KPI ‘position at the end of the race’ and set the target to be 1. We judge the runner’s performance by creating a grading system that compares the actual value to the target:

1 = success

2-20 = pretty good

>20 = not acceptable

In other words, anything but a top 20 finish would be viewed as poor performance. We could even map these categories to the classic green/yellow/red stoplight metaphor.

The system is very adaptable. As this runner improves over time, we can change the grading system for future races so that only a top 10 finish would be considered good performance. Another, less accomplished runner, could share the same objective and KPI but create a different target and grading system as follows:

< 25 = success

25-100 = pretty good

>100 = not acceptable

By changing the KPI ‘position at the end of the race’ to just ‘position’, we can even monitor progress during the race . Effectively we have switched from a lagging to a leading indicator of performance.

If you’re a runner, you may have recognized a potential complication. A runner who is a strong finisher may not expect to be in the top few positions during the first half of the race but wait to the last few miles for a closing kick. In fact, any particular race may have a disproportionate number of fast starters (so-called rabbits) that don’t pose a serious threat.

To handle this situation, we can introduce a second KPI that monitors performance for the same objective: ‘average time per mile’. Average time per mile can be measured at various points during the race to benchmark performance. Depending on your skill level, the multiple targets could be 5:00 at mile 4, 5:35 at mile 10, and 5:20 at mile 20. An appropriate grading system might be < 2 seconds difference = success, 2-5 secs difference = pretty good, >5 secs difference = not acceptable. Average time per mile also allows you to compare performance between races and between runners with similar capabilities.

We all want to win the race. But we can do a better job of improving performance if we focus on targets to allow us to reach our objectives.

source :  http://alignment.wordpress.com/2008/10/05/target-vs-goal/

Fire Your Boss

www.jerkbossesihaveknown.com

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