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What Is a Balanced Scorecard?

28 June, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Dull but Important What Is a Balanced Scorecard? That is not an exciting question. So let me try and give you a compelling answer. A Small Problem With the Exhaust In December 2017, Oliver Schmidt, a General Manager for Volkswagen, was sentenced to seven years in prison and fined $400,000. He had been on holiday […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: key performance indicators, measurement

If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It

21 June, 2022 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

You Can’t Manage What You Can’t Measure

Unhelpful Statements One of Peter Drucker’s maxims was “if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I have lots of sympathy for the statement. If you aren’t measuring performance, you can’t see if it is getting better or worse; if you don’t know if it is getting better or worse, you aren’t managing it. I like a robust […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: beliefs, command and control, key performance indicators, measurement, Peter Drucker, targets

Does Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?

8 June, 2022 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Does a Learning Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?

My Favourite Quote Peter Drucker once said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Those words chime so loudly for me that it is like sitting in the belfry next to Big Ben. Just because I agree with a statement doesn’t make it right. Beliefs are dangerous things, so I decided I had better check. Is […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: culture, fear and anxiety, flow, learning, measurement, operational excellence, performance management, purpose

Medieval Plumbing

12 September, 2019 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Delayed feedback When I was a child I lived in a farm house in North Yorkshire.  I’d like to tell you that I was part of the county set and owned a Range Rover and a horse, but it wasn’t that sort of farm house.  It had stone walls that were three feet thick in […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: human nature, lead and lag measures, learning, measurement, systems thinking, tampering

Pointless Conversations

16 July, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Defining the metric People get very excited about metrics; they spend hours debating exceptions and accuracy.  The definition becomes everything. Imagine the conversation: My Boss: You take too long to get to work in the morning; we must measure performance. What should the target be? Me: I’m not sure; there are several things we should […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: cheating, Goodhart's law, key performance indicators, measurement, objective setting, performance management, systems thinking

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