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No set of measures will give an automatic answer.
What really matters is not the performance of the individual stars but the performance of the collective.
The most serious problem is the chronic micromanager who is also an authoritarian.
The key group is upper–middle management, people running a department or unit who are senior enough to have to make strategic decisions.
If the principles are so universal and bland that no trade-offs can be made, they will have little impact.
If company objectives are in conflict with personal ones, only one of them will win.
The two most important organizational processes are budgeting and performance appraisal.
The more objectives someone has, the harder it is for them to focus on what really matters and the more their freedom of action is constrained.
Dispensing medals or money is part of corporate body language. It reveals what is really valued, whatever people say.
the ultimate judgment is about the fulfillment of the intent.
if faced with a choice between optimizing targets and optimizing what really matters, people optimize the targets.
a scorecard is fundamentally a control system, whereas the prime purpose of strategy is command; that is, setting direction.
In the language of business, “command and control” has come to mean “micromanagement” with an authoritarian bent. In military thinking it is the means of setting direction and achieving specific outcomes.54 Authoritarian micromanagement is just one – particularly bad – way of doing it.
no act of command can be derived from any act of control even in principle, no matter how sophisticated the system.
To exercise command is to articulate an intention to achieve a desired outcome and align a system to behave in such a way that the outcome can be expected to be achieved.
To exercise control is to monitor the actual effects resulting from the behavior, assess the information, and report on the system’s performance with respect to the desired outcome.
while no driver would undertake a journey in a car with no instrument panel, when they’re actually driving good drivers spend most of their time looking through the windscreen at the road and the other traffic, and react fast to what they see.
We could get by with balanced scorecards and strategy maps alone if business organizations were frictionless machines.
The danger is charismatic leaders who neither understand nor have the intellect to carry out the tasks of command.
intent does not need to be set by one person or indeed any single, central body.
