Coming soon · Book Profile
Performance Management - Finding the Missing Pieces (to Close the Intelligence Gap)
An argument that organizations should stop applying business improvement methods in isolation and instead orchestrate strategy maps, scorecards, activity-based management, and analytic technology into a single, integrated performance management system that closes the intelligence gap between strategy and execution.
A profile of this book is on the way.
What it’s about
Gary Cokins contends that most organizations are data rich but information poor, drowning in transactional data yet unable to translate strategy into results because their improvement programs—balanced scorecards, activity-based costing, six sigma, lean, CRM—operate as disconnected silos. 'Performance Management' reframes these familiar methodologies as interlocking gears of one overarching discipline that gives managers and employee teams the visibility, fact-based data, and analytic intelligence to align daily work with executive strategy, make better trade-off decisions, and ultimately convert customer value into shareholder wealth. Drawing on decades of consulting in cost management and industrial engineering, Cokins offers a practitioner's synthesis—strategy maps for focus, scorecards for communication and feedback, ABM for reliable cost and profit truth, and data warehousing/analytics as enablers—showing that technology is no longer the impediment; the thinking is. The book equips readers to escalate managing from an apprenticeship-based craft into a formal, systems-thinking discipline.
The through-line
- Who it’s for
- A manager or executive who wants to successfully execute their organization's strategy and improve its direction, traction, and speed.
- The problem
- Strategy fails to translate into results because improvement methodologies operate in isolation and transactional systems produce data but not actionable intelligence. They feel stymied and frustrated—unable to get employees to execute strategy, uncertain which customers and products are truly profitable, and boxed in by conflicting objectives.
- The plan
- Focus: define and adjust strategy using strategy maps to select cause-and-effect strategic objectives.
- Communicate with feedback: derive scorecards with weighted KPIs that make strategy everyone's job.
- Ground decisions in fact-based data via activity-based management for accurate cost and profit truth.
- Integrate core solutions—customer, supplier, process, shareholder, and employee intelligence.
- Leverage data warehousing, mining, and analytics to enable forward-looking, calculated-risk decisions.
- The payoff
- Employees clearly understand strategy and see how their work contributes, pulling in the same direction. · Managers make better trade-off decisions, migrating customers to higher profitability and creating shareholder wealth. · The organization operates as one coordinated system with lifted fog, visible costs, and calculated risk-taking.
See our guide
Related profiles we’ve built
Additional reading
- Design, Implementation and Evaluation of Assessment and Development Centres; Best practice guidelines · British Psychological Society (BPS)
Cited by the author as an authoritative source for best practice, covering key issues like fairness, design, and evaluation that are central to the book's guidance.
- Assessment Centres (3rd edn) · C Woodruffe
Recommended for readers seeking a broader overview and history of the assessment centre method.
- The big five personality dimensions and job-performance; a meta-analysis · Barrick, M R and Mount, K M
Provides the empirical support for the book's caution against over-relying on personality tests in selection, a key topic in Chapter 5.
- A theory of the validity of predictors in selection · M Smith
Offers a theoretical framework for understanding why different selection tools have varying levels of effectiveness, underpinning the book's core argument.
- Competence at Work · Spencer, L M and Spencer, S M
A foundational text on the concept of competence, relevant to Chapter 2 on developing a competence framework.
- Development and Assessment Centres · Charles Woodruffe
Cited as a key text for readers wanting a more recent and in-depth exposition of assessment centre work, a core topic of the book.
- Performance Management: The new realities · Michael Armstrong and Angela Baron
The book uses Armstrong and Baron's definition of performance management as its foundation, making their work a primary source for understanding this core concept.
- The Competent Manager: A model for effective performance · R. F. Boyatzis
The author attributes the current usage and definition of 'competency' to Boyatzis, making this a foundational text for a central theme of the book.
- Appraisal and Feedback: Making performance review work · Clive Fletcher
Fletcher is cited as an authority on appraisals, a key one-to-one interaction within performance management, providing deeper insight into this specific practice.
- The Easy Guide to Repertory Grids · D. Jankowicz
The book presents the repertory grid as a powerful technique for developing interview models; this book is recommended as a highly accessible introduction to the method.