ISDS Performance Management
Downloads
Quote:
"Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit"
Henry Brooks Adams
New Beginnings ... or 'Out of bad comes good'!
I don’t know about you but I’m totally fed up with so called ‘expert’ economists and amateur media speculation spreading gloom, doom and despondency.
You’d think we’d never experienced recession before.
I’m beginning to think, as they say in Leeds; ‘They know nowt!’
OK, so business and the economy are tough right now; and our financial/banking guru’s have made it much worse by their past greed and current retrenched positioning. If you listened to them, you’d think that we business folk had caused the problem and must now find a way to ‘fund’ them out of their problems.
However, we business leaders live in the real world and we have to manage our enterprises and make decisions based upon the facts that we have and the areas we can influence. There is no point in wasting time or energy on their distractions.
Besides, every ‘threat’ brings with it ‘opportunity’.
I believe that one thing is clear though …. the banking ‘fraternity’ and financial community has changed forever and access to much needed finance will only be approved IF the business case is sound from every aspect.
Personally, I don’t believe that this is necessarily a bad thing; as long as common sense and logic prevail. A big ask given their historical decision making perhaps.
As business leaders we must also take our share of the ‘blame’ in this. For too long British business has trundled along, using traditional management techniques which facilitate poor efficiencies and flexibility. This approach not only wastes cash and impedes cash generation, but also seriously impairs competitive positioning.
We’ve watched it happening to UK manufacturing for decades and little or nothing has changed to stop the rot. Our excuse has been ‘cheaper labour’ in 3rd world countries. It would be wrong to consider this has no part to play, but with contemporary technologies and techniques available, I’ve often wondered why labour rates had such an impact. The fact is that our efficiencies, effectiveness and flexibility is poor by international standards and most of them are not that good at it! However, over the last decade all of our business types have been exposed as globalisation takes hold and the internet starts to make its profound impact.
Change is the name of the game …. to survive as well as build sustainability.
The fact is that over 60 years ago Dr W Edwards Deming pointed us in the right direction with his systemic process driven and 'leadership' approach to management. More recently, in the mid 90's Dr's Kaplan and Norton brought us the Balanced Scorecard which provides the tools to align and balance resources for improved performance.