Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: Radically Rethinking Management for a Volatile World, Third Edition

Chapter 2. What Is Performance Management?

	A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.
	--George S. Patton

Patton neatly sums up the essence of performance management. It is not just about the quality of the plan but also about its execution. Unfortunately, many organizations seek to build the perfect plan and the perfect budget only to find that the world has changed by the time they come to execute. Never was this more apparent than during the fourth quarter of 2008, when company after company was forced to rewrite plans and budgets for 2009 as the global economy hurtled into recession. A finance executive at one of my clients commented, "We have been building a new plan every week for the last three months."

The effects of changing market boundaries, redefined supply chains, merger and acquisition activity, better-informed customers, changing regulations, and shrinking cycle times discussed in Chapter 1 places tremendous pressure on managers to accommodate complexity and change. In the face of such challenges, many have come to the conclusion that the management processes upon which they have relied for more than50years are no longer up to the job. Best practice companies are rising to the challenge and taking a radical look at how they plan and manage. The need to be more agile, more responsive, and more tolerant of uncertainty demands that best practice compliance becomes a basic operating principle. Organizations are being forced to radically ...