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Author: Dean R. Spitzer, Ph.D.
Copyright: 2008
Publisher: AMACOM
# of Pages: 288
Price: $29.95
ISBN-10: 0814408915
ISBN-13: 978-0814408919
Date of Review: March, 2007
This review originally appeared in Training Magazine and is reprinted with permission. See www.trainingmag.com.
Transforming Performance Measurement. It's amazing how often, at the very moment I am cogitating on some problem, the mailman arrives with a new book that addresses the very thing upon which I am cogitating. On this particular occasion I happened to be reading over an annual performance plan for an HR Manager, written by a busy-bee committee on "metrics", and wondering why it included as a target behavior — are you ready? — 100% retention of the organization's staff. Not desirable retention. Not retention after slug removal. But 100% retention.
Well, it is a metric.
And this is largely Spitzer's point. Organizations work very hard to establish measures for measurement's sake, and invent numbers because somebody wants a "metric", while forever missing the point: "What contributes to our success?" Anyone who's ever been frustrated by performance plans like the one described above, or seen office staff rated "exemplary" for answering phones by the third ring, or seen sales reps rewarded for closing sales by the end of the month even if furious customers will never repeat their business, will finally feel someone — Spitzer — gets it. (And I just love his comments on "the myth of the rational customer", and projects planned with enormous unnecessary amounts of slack time so as to ensure on-time delivery).
Spitzer, unlike many writers on the subject, finds ways to move beyond the effort to isolate numbers and meaningless measures to place measurement in organizational and social contexts. If there's any weakness — and it's a problem with nearly all texts on this subject — it's that the author writes of a workplace seemingly populated with only professional-level staff. In my state-government world, the challenges of finding meaningful measures for performance of staff like housekeeper, highway paving frontline crew, prison guard, and health care technician are never ending. Otherwise, though, I have no criticism. The book is readable yet content-rich, with in-depth discussions of dysfunctional measurement, the benefits of better measurement, and extensive discussion of transforming measurement from bean-counting to real outcomes. The book concludes with 34 "T-Maps", transformational measurement action plans, suggesting approaches to measuring those things so valuable yet so hard to pin down, like reputation, trust, organizational agility, customer profitability, service quality, and employee engagement.
Review by : Jane Bozarth
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