Beware What You Call Gambling
A lot of the literature about performance management likes to assume that the world is a perfectly ordered place, that the right actions will result in increased performance, and that bad performance indicates there’s a problem. But the real world is a place where sheer randomness has big effects, and is especially prevalent hanything to do with the actions of fickle human beings. Some recent news provides an instructive insight about the role... [Read More...]
An Introduction to the SAP 5O5 World Sailing Championships 2010
There seems to be a connection between enterprise software billionaires and sail racing. Larry prefers the bigger boats, while Hasso prefers getting wet: For Plattner, sailing two man dinghies and jumping off his 505 into chest-high water to prevent it from getting racked on the beach at Crissy Field is a far cry from having a professional crew guide a Farr 40 or his MaxZ yacht into a slip at Porto Cervo or another yachting Mecca. ‘The 505... [Read More...]
Performance Excellence, Past and Future?
One of the problems of explaining the value of business intelligence is that every layer of computing has always promised some variation on “better management” as the ultimate benefit of purchasing the system. From 1959 mainframes (above), early “executive information systems”, the 1982 IBM PC (right), the first spreadsheets (far right), 1980s ERP systems and ”decision support systems” to today’s... [Read More...]
I was the eighth employee of 
