Russ Banham

A company needs to define the KPIs that best tell its tale from a strategic standpoint. Consultants advise starting with buckets like financial performance, customer satisfaction, operational performance, marketing effectiveness and employee performance. Then, they can devise a set of pertinent KPIs within each of these buckets.
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This winnowing process depends on the type of business a company is in, its strategic goals and the … [ Read more ]

Appraising Performance Appraisals

How the best companies assess employee performance—and what you can learn from them.

Is Your Enterprise Platform Still Aligned With Your Strategy?

To ensure that business functions are performing in alignment with strategy, organizations rely upon key performance indicators (KPIs) to provide timely assessments of potential problems and opportunities. Without such clarity, CEO decision-making is compromised. KPIs must be as dynamic as business itself, altering and evolving to adjust to new opportunities and competitive threats.

EVA and the Private Company

What can “economic value added,” increasingly considered the public company’s preferred performance metric, do for your company?

Russ Banham, Karen O’Leonard

Just as companies parse KPIs into different buckets, the KPIs themselves can be fragmented into insightful silos of information, says Karen O’Leonard. “Many businesses use ‘employee turnover rates’ as a key metric, but we suggest you break down this KPI into more meaningful components like the turnover rates for critical roles—the high performers [who], were you to lose them, would cause significant business and financial … [ Read more ]

M&A: Adding Up the Numbers

How does one define M&A success? Chief Executive reached out to two respected corporate performance consultancies—EVA Dimensions and Applied Finance Group—and put the question to them. Each came up with what they consider to be the truest test of a flourishing or regretful M&A transaction. The firms applied their metrics to six M&A deals, analyzed in full on the following pages.

Game Changer

Want to score big with your next new product or growth strategy? Take it one level at a time.

How GLOBAL Is Your Board

No one disputes that the competitive chessboard today is global, and will continue to become even more international in scope as emerging markets like China, India and Latin America burgeon. Yet, most U.S. multinationals, alleging impediments like travel impositions and language and cultural barriers, retain boards that reflect the American and not the global marketplace.

When Do Companies Outgrow Their Spreadsheets?

There comes a time at every smaller, growing company when managers perceive a need for more sophisticated software tools than spreadsheet-dependent planning, budgeting, and forecasting.

Amazon Finally Clicks

Ten years old and profitable at last, it offers a textbook lesson on how to be both focused and flexible.

BI: Everything Must Go

Corporate managers often feel boxed in by their own supply chains. Business-intelligence software may open them up to new possibilities.

Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide

Vendors continue to tout business intelligence as the next big thing in corporate computing. And in fact, sales of BI products rose to nearly $4 billion last year — and could hit $6 billion by 2005.

But while the virtues of BI tools are plenty (including huge ROI numbers), big-bang rollouts of the software may be a mistake. Indeed, some business intelligence vendors say the smart … [ Read more ]

Paperless Trade Finance: Pulp Fiction?

The launch of electronic trade finance services could make oceans of paperwork disappear.

The Warren Buffett School

They have free rein, ready capital and the best boss a CEO could want. They run Berkshire Hathaway companies, and you’ve only begun to envy them.

Special Report on 401(k)s: Dear Prudence

Offering company stock in employee 401(k)s may not always be wise. Just ask Lucent.

Everything Must Go: Business Process Outsourcing

Eager to focus on the things they do best, companies have turned to business process outsourcers for virtually everything else.