BUSINESS BOOK REVIEWS

PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business

by Wayne W. Eckerson

Tips, techniques, and trends on how to use dashboard technology to optimize business performance. Business performance management is a hot new management discipline that delivers tremendous value when supported by information technology. Through case studies and industry research, this book shows how leading companies are using performance dashboards to execute strategy, optimize business processes, and improve performance. In Performance Dashboards, author Wayne Eckerson shows how performance dashboards focus business people on the right things to do and doing things right. As Director of Research and Services for The Data Warehousing Institute, a worldwide association of business intelligence professionals, Eckerson interviewed dozens of organizations that have built various types of performance dashboards in different industries and lines of business. His practical insights provide a road map to help you turbo-charge performance–management initiatives with dashboard technology to optimize performance and accelerate results.

Key Performance Indicators: Developing, Implementing,and Using Winning KPIs

by David Parmenter

Breathtaking in its simplicity and profound in its impact, Key Performance Indicators (KPI) distills the balanced scorecard process into twelve logical steps, equipping users with an implementation resource kit that includes questionnaires, worksheets, workshop outlines, and a list of over 500 performance measures. Author David Parmenter provides you with everything you need to master and implement a KPI-driven strategy. By exploring measures that have transformed businesses, David Parmenter has developed a methodology that is breathtaking in its simplicity and yet profound in its impact. It has been said that Key Performance Indicators is the missing link between the balanced scorecard work of Robert Kaplan and David Norton and the reality of implementing performance measurement in an organization.

Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management

by Bob Paladino

Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management not only chronicles innovative best practices from award-winning executives, but also brings you a proven implementation model that has accelerated breakthrough results. Learn new techniques common to Malcolm Baldrige, the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame, Sterling Quality, Fortune 100 Best, APQC, and Forbes Award winners. What do award-winning commercial, public, and nonprofit enterprises know that eludes most of today's executives? How do they organize and conduct themselves to accelerate and achieve outsized results? What core processes and best practices do they leverage? Learn the key principles of executing strategy from the executives directly in Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management.

Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: From Data to Decisions

by David A. J. Axson

Bombarded by an avalanche of information, today's managers find that traditional budgeting, forecasting, and reporting techniques are not only obsolete, they're dangerous. They are simply too slow, too detailed, and too disconnected for the information age we live in. If you are looking to significantly upgrade your management practices to better meet the needs of today’s increasingly volatile, complex, competitive, and global markets, look no further. Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management Reporting, Second Edition provides you with an accessible framework to help any business unite its reporting and budgeting functions to achieve its strategic objectives.

BUSINESS STRATEGY

The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action

by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

Here is the book by the recognized architects of the Balanced Scorecard that shows how managers can use this revolutionary tool to mobilize their people to fulfill the company's mission. More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals. Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories-financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth-to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives. The authors also reveal how to use the Balanced Scorecard as a robust learning system for testing, gaining feedback on, and updating the organization's strategy. Finally, they walk through the steps that managers in any company can use to build their own Balanced Scorecard.

The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment

by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton

In today's business environment, strategy has never been more important. Yet research shows that most companies fail to execute strategy successfully. Behind this abysmal track record lies an undeniable fact: many companies continue to use management processes-top-down, financially driven, and tactical-that were designed to run yesterday's organizations. Now, the creators of the revolutionary performance management tool called the Balanced Scorecard introduce a new approach that makes strategy a continuous process owned not just by top management, but by everyone. In The Strategy-Focused Organization, Robert Kaplan and David Norton share the results of ten years of learning and research into more than 200 companies that have implemented the Balanced Scorecard. Drawing from more than twenty in-depth case studies-including Mobil, CIGNA, Nova Scotia Power, and AT&T Canada-Kaplan and Norton illustrate how Balanced Scorecard adopters have taken their groundbreaking tool to the next level. These organizations have used the scorecard to create an entirely new performance management framework that puts strategy at the center of key management processes and systems. Kaplan and Norton articulate the five key principles required for building Strategy-Focused Organizations: (1) translate the strategy to operational terms, (2) align the organization to the strategy, (3) make strategy everyone's everyday job, (4) make strategy a continual process, and (5) mobilize change through strong, effective leadership. The authors provide a detailed account of how a range of organizations in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors have deployed these principles to achieve breakthrough, sustainable performance improvements.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

by Jim Collins

The Challenge: Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study: For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards: Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons: The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't.

The Findings: The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.

The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.

A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, Charles Burck

Execution is "the missing link between aspirations and results," and as such, making it happen is the business leader's most important job. While failure in today's business environment is often attributed to other causes, Bossidy and Charan argue that the biggest obstacle to success is the absence of execution. They point out that without execution, breakthrough thinking on managing change breaks down, and they emphasize the fact that execution is a discipline to learn, not merely the tactical side of business. Supporting this with stories of the "execution difference" being won (EDS) and lost (Xerox and Lucent), the authors describe the building blocks--leaders with the right behaviors, a culture that rewards execution, and a reliable system for having the right people in the right jobs--that need to be in place to manage the three core business processes of people, strategy, and operations. This book shows how to get the job done and deliver results . . . whether you’re running an entire company or in your first management job.

Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant

by W. Chan Kim, Renée Mauborgne

Winning by not competing: a fresh approach to strategy. Since the dawn of the industrial age, companies have engaged in head-to-head competition in search of sustained, profitable growth. They have fought for competitive advantage, battled over market share, and struggled for differentiation. Yet these hallmarks of competitive strategy are not the way to create profitable growth in the future. In a book that challenges everything you thought you knew about the requirements for strategic success, W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne argue that cutthroat competition results in nothing but a bloody red ocean of rivals fighting over a shrinking profit pool. Based on a study of 150 strategic moves spanning more than a hundred years and thirty industries, the authors argue that lasting success comes not from battling competitors, but from creating “blue oceans”: untapped new market spaces ripe for growth. Such strategic moves—which the authors call “value innovation”—create powerful leaps in value that often render rivals obsolete for more than a decade. Blue Ocean Strategy presents a systematic approach to making the competition irrelevant and outlines principles and tools any company can use to create and capture blue oceans. A landmark work that upends traditional thinking about strategy, this book charts a bold new path to winning the future.

By Jack Welch, Suzy Welch

In Winning, Welch focuses on his actual management techniques. He starts with an overview of cultural values such as candor, differentiation among employees, and inclusion of all voices in decision-making. In the second section he covers issues around one's own company or organization: the importance of hiring, firing, the people management in between, and a few other juicy topics like crisis management. From there, Welch moves into a discussion of competition, and the external factors that can influence a company's success: strategy, budgeting, and mergers and acquisitions. Welch takes a more personal turn later with a focus on individual career issues--how to find the right job, get promoted, and deal with a bad boss--and then a final section on what he calls "Tying Up Loose Ends." Those interested in the human side of great leaders will find this last section especially appealing. In it, Welch answers the most interesting questions that he's received in the last several years while traveling the globe addressing audiences of executives and business-school students.

HR METRICS & HR MANAGEMENT

The Future of Human Resource Management: 64 Thought Leaders Explore the Critical HR Issues of Today and Tomorrow

by Mike Losey, Dave Ulrich, Sue Meisinger

This book presents an international panel of expert contributors who offer their views on the state of HR and what to expect in the future. Topics covered include HR as a decision science, understanding and managing people, creating and adapting organizational culture, the effects of globalization, collaborative ventures, and investing in the next generation. Professional human resources management is an increasingly vital area in any organization, given its responsibility for building talent and creating other organizational capabilities that create competitive advantage through hiring, training, and rewarding people, and designing and managing organization processes. As business pushes on into the future and adapts to new realities, the practice of HR must keep up, and practitioners must stay abreast of changes in the field in order to prepare for the future. Inside you'll find thought-provoking essays you won't find anywhere else—Coleman Peterson reveals how Wal-Mart hires and keeps its people; Peter Cappelli and Mike Losey offer divergent views on the possibility of a labor shortage in America; Libby Sartain explores HR's role in brand development; Gordon Hewitt writes about HR's contribution to business strategy; and Frances Hesselbein applies her leadership expertise to HR governance issues.

by Brian E. Becker, Mark A. Huselid, Dave Ulrich

Introduces a new way of measuring and thinking about the contributions of individuals to business success. Makes the case that the role of Human Resources is increasingly important, as company assets become more intangible and reliant on intellectual capital. Provides a framework that focuses on identifying where Human Resources issues are performance drivers--or impediments--to strategy implementation. Develops a measurement system that provides valid, reliable indicators of Human Resources' contribution to the success of strategy implementation, and ultimately to firm performance. Includes recommendations supported by clear and persuasive examples, as well as the authors' unique survey of 2,800 firms. A text outlining a powerful measurement system for highlighting the role that human resources plays as a source of competitive advantage and a driver of value creation in a company. Builds on the proven Balanced Scorecard model, showing how to link HR's results to measures that gain respect such as profitability and shareholder value.

by David Ulrich, Wayne Brockbank

HR’s leading thinkers provide a blueprint for the future. The international bestseller Human Resource Champions helped set the HR agenda for the 1990s and enabled HR professionals to become strategic partners in their organizations. But earning a seat at the executive table was only the beginning. Today’s HR leaders must also bring substantial value to that table. Drawing on their sixteen-year study of over 29,000 HR professionals and line managers, leading HR experts Dave Ulrich and Wayne Brockbank propose The HR Value Proposition. The authors argue that HR value creation requires a deep understanding of external business realities and how value is defined by key stakeholders both inside and outside the company. They provide practical tools and worksheets for leveraging this knowledge to create HR practices, build organizational capabilities, design HR strategy, and marshal resources that create value for customers, investors, executives, and employees. Written by the field’s premier trailblazers, this book charts the path HR professionals must take to help lead their organizations into the future.

by Mark A. Huselid, Brian E. Becker, Richard W. Beatty

Driving strategy through workforce performance - In a marketplace fueled by intangible assets, anything less than optimal workforce success can threaten a firm’s survival. Yet in most organizations, employee performance is both poorly managed and underutilized. The Workforce Scorecard argues that current management and human resource practices hinder employees’ ability to contribute to strategic goals. To maximize the power of their workforce, organizations must meet three challenges: view their workforce in terms of contribution rather than cost; replace benchmarking metrics with measures that differentiate levels of strategic impact; and make line managers and HR professionals jointly responsible for executing workforce initiatives. Building on the proven model outlined in their bestselling book The HR Scorecard, Mark Huselid, Brian Becker, and coauthor Richard Beatty show how to create a Workforce Scorecard that identifies and measures the behaviors, competencies, mind-set, and culture required for workforce success and reveals how each dimension impacts the bottom line. Practical and timely, The Workforce Scorecard offers crucial lessons for leveraging human capital to achieve strategic success.

MARKETING METRICS & MARKETING MANAGEMENT

by Paul W. Farris (Author), Neil T. Bendle (Author), Phillip E. Pfeifer (Author), David J. Reibstein

Few marketers recognize the extraordinary range of metrics now available for evaluating their strategies and tactics. In Marketing Metrics, four leading researchers and consultants systematically introduce today's most powerful marketing metrics. The authors show how to use a "dashboard" of metrics to view market dynamics from various perspectives, maximize accuracy, and "triangulate" to optimal solutions. Their comprehensive coverage includes measurements of promotional strategy, advertising, and distribution; customer perceptions; market share; competitors' power; margins and profits; products and portfolios; customer profitability; sales forces and channels; pricing strategies; and more. You'll learn how and when to apply each metric, and understand tradeoffs and nuances that are critical to using them successfully. The authors also demonstrate how to use marketing metrics as leading indicators, identifying crucial new opportunities and challenges. For clarity and simplicity all calculations can be performed by hand, or with basic spreadsheet techniques. In coming years, few marketers will rise to senior executive levels without deep fluency in marketing metrics. This book is the fastest, easiest way to gain that fluency.

by John Davis

Marketing is now being asked to be measurably accountable for not only the top-line of their income statement, but also for the bottom-line as well. They're being asked to account for the total marketing program in addition to its component product programs, its advertising, sales promotion, sales and distribution, and pricing programs. This is the first book that addresses the clamor and demand from marketing’s many stakeholders to be accountable for its strategies and activities. 103 different measures that marketers and senior managers should know organized into three main themes: marketing planning and customers, the offering, and sales force, it is a practical, straightforward reference for business leaders seeking clear explanations on how to measure marketing.

Marketing Metrics and Financial Performance

by Donald R. Lehmann, David J. Reibstein

Examines the current focus on measuring marketing productivity, develops a metrics "value chain," outlines findings on how marketing actions and customer assets link to product-market and financial performance, and discusses methodogical approaches and issues.

QUALITY TOOLS & QUALITY MANAGEMENT

by James R. Evans, William M. Lindsay

Provides an introduction to quality management principles, focuses on the management system which deal with customer needs & technical issues, tools & techniques addressing the quality assurance system from the perspective of ISO 9000. Prepare for success in quality management today with this leading text's focus on the fundamental principles and emphasis on high performance management practices, such as those reflected in the Baldrige Criteria. These authors are experienced leaders in the fields of performance management and quality. Look no further for the definitive resource for coverage of ISO 9000 certification, Six Sigma, and the U.S. Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award standards. A wealth of current examples from leading organizations reflect quality throughout the world as they emphasize the practical aspects of the book's managerial focus and pertinent technical topics.

by Thomas Pyzdek

Six Sigma has helped organizations of all types and sizes improve the quality of processes and products while simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction and saving billions of dollars. The Six Sigma Handbook covers the management systems and statistical tools that are the foundation for this revolutionary new approach to management. Thomas Pyzdek offers expert, proven advice on using Six Sigma to retain customers and enhance bottom line performance while cutting costs dramatically. He explains exactly how to make Six Sigma work, including organizing for Six Sigma, the various levels of technical proficiency required, criteria for selecting personnel for training, using customer requirements to drive strategy and operations, successful project management, and much more. For the manager or quality professional charged with implementing or supporting Six Sigma--no matter the industry--this timely guide will help any organization achieve the goal of becoming a truly world-class operation.

by Michael L. George, John Maxey, David T. Rowlands, Michael George, David Rowlands, Mark Price

The Lean Six Sigma Pocket Toolbook blends Lean and Six Sigma tools and concepts, providing expert advice on how to determine which tool within a "family" is best for different purposes. Packed with detailed examples and step-bystep instructions, it's the ideal handy reference guide to help Green and Black Belts make the transition from the classroom to the field. Features brief summaries and examples of the 70 most important tools in Lean Six Sigma, such as "Pull," "Heijunka," and "Control Charts". Groups tools by purpose and usage. Offers a quick, easy reference on using the DMAIC improvement cycle. Provides comprehensive coverage in a compact, portable format.

DATA VISUALIZATION & BUSINESS REPORTING

by Edward R. Tufte

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition

by Edward R. Tufte

A timeless classic in how complex information should be presented graphically. Should occupy a place of honor--within arm's reach--of everyone attempting to understand or depict numerical data graphically. The design of the book is an exemplar of the principles it espouses: elegant typography and layout, and seamless integration of lucid text and perfectly chosen graphical examples. Very Highly Recommended.

by Edward R. Tufte

With Visual Explanations, Edward R. Tufte adds a third volume to his indispensable series on information display. The first, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, which focuses on charts and graphs that display numerical information, virtually defined the field. The second, Envisioning Information, explores similar territory but with an emphasis on maps and cartography. Visual Explanations centers on dynamic data--information that changes over time. (Tufte has described the three books as being about, respectively, "pictures of numbers, pictures of nouns, and pictures of verbs.")

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