January 13th, 2009
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I work with a lot of public agencies and their Boards of Directors. Typically, my focus is on helping these Board develop a high-level scorecard that the Board can rely on for measuring the organization’s performance. This, in turn, will accelerate the organization to attain higher levels of performance.
The important thing about the scorecard is that it has to be balanced. It has to balance all the aspects of what is essential to the organization’s success – from financial sustainability to customer satisfaction, from product reliability to ethical integrity.
The organization’s core values are the things that, if the organization could speak for itself, it would say are most important to it. Each of them can be measured. A balanced scorecard will look at 8-10 different categories of core values and assign metrics and targets to each of them. A tool on our website called Developing Core Values explains this in detail.
An unbalanced scorecard, in contrast, will have too many metrics. They won’t be focused on outcomes, but rather on outputs. Too many of them will fall into one category, like financial. Other core values, like integrity or environmental stewardship, may be neglected.
Read Next Blog Article: “Corporate Leadership Development Program“
Tags: performance scorecard, public agency scorecard
Posted in Governance Development, Performance Management |
3 Comments »
January 3rd, 2009
My family and I just came back from four days at Disneyland. Christmas to New Year’s is always the busiest time at the Magic Kingdom. But despite the huge crowds, people were smiling and having fun. We all know that Disney Corp. is a master of integration, with classic cartoon characters, movies, theme parks, hotels, and cruise ships woven together into a seamless spectrum of products and entertainment. We also know that Disneyland is a place where the child in us can come out and run free. I watched a couple from Japan, both in their 30s, with no children in tow, behave like little kids at the sight of Minnie Mouse.
But what I realized is that Disney is not only in the integration business. It’s also in the transportation business. Disney makes people happy by transporting them back to a state of childlike happiness. There’s no other place that does that half as well. Whether singing along with audio-animatronic pirates or getting your photo taken with Eeyore, every moment is designed to transport you back to a happy memory from childhood.
It got me to thinking that every company needs a similar “transportation” strategy – a strategy for transporting people to a happier place mentally and emotionally. That strategy will be driven by a deeply ingrained vision of how you want to make people feel.
So ask yourself: “What is our transportation strategy? How do we want to make people feel?” Whether a bank, a restaurant, or clothing store, every company should have one. If not, your customers will see you as a commodity, and value you accordingly. In these economic times, that’s a risk you can hardly afford to take.
Tags: improving business vision
Posted in Strategic Planning |
2 Comments »
