This Easter I went skiing. During my trip thought about old Norwegian heroes who traveled by skis to the North and the South Poles. Wow - those were long journeys.

When I consult with companies I always look for the type of perspective of the people I meet. I encounter many different people, and what strikes me is that they often hold a very narrow view of performance.

Many managers appear to believe that the right way to manage a company is to put a lot of control mechanisms in place. This thinking is driven by the idea that all people are lazy and need to be closely managed. Balanced Scorecard can also be implemented as a system of control and follow up. In Western countries I have observed that this often leads to the failure of BSC projects.

How many times have you seen the above scenario take place— a manager who sets an unrealistic goal?   What does this do to the motivation of the team?  How does this affect their performance to achieve other, more reachable goals?

I read a lot of strategy documents and most of them are written using common language. Words like the best, outstanding, leading, world class, and international have different meaning to different people.

When people ask me about customer references I always tell them that they should not ask the person that has committed the money for the project. This person is by default obliged to say that the project was a success.

I recently turned 40, and like many other men my age, I am cultivating a bit of a belly. Over the past few years, I have weighed myself more than ever. Sadly, the needle on the scale keeps going up and up.

Measure focused companies are very eager to find the "right" KPI. I doubt the existence of perfect KPIs. But in our endeavoring search for perfection, we have to make compromises. After all, you might actually find "gold" on "the golden happy mean".
When I am working with measures/KPIs I have a list that I am using assessing the quality of a KPI.

The selection of key performance indicators (KPIs) is on the minds of many companies these days. I have had consultants from the most prestigious strategy and management companies call me to ask what KPIs they should use for a particular industry. I always answer them, "the KEY performance indicator that you are looking for is dependant on the DOOR that you are going to open."

I have seen many strategy maps and I have also seen many people working with strategy maps over the last decade.

In the process of developing maps I have observed people struggle to illustrate all causes and effects that occur in their company. At the end it looks like the "airline route net" that you find in an in-flight magazine where all routes are crossing each other.