Research in Motion’s public battle

5 07 2011

When executives feel they have to go outside of a chain of command in order to voice concerns, we see perfect examples of the need for Operational Performance Management (OPM).  The current Research in Motion public battle is a great place to start.  An anonymous executive sent an open letter to Jonathan Geller, of The Boy Genius (BGR.com), to call out the current RIM culture.  What is more entertaining about this is the fact that RIM responds publicly, which only makes this sound like a bigger problem.

Highlights of the RIM letter:

  • You have many smart employees, many that have great ideas for the future, but unfortunately the culture at RIM does not allow us to speak openly without having to worry about the career-limiting effects.
  • We often make product decisions based on strategic alignment, partner requests or even legal advice — the end user doesn’t care. We simply have to admit that Apple is nailing this and it is one of the reasons they have people lining up overnight at stores around the world, and products sold out for months. These people aren’t hypnotized zombies, they simply love beautifully designed products that are user centric and work how they are supposed to work.
  • Teams still aren’t talking together properly, no one is making or can make critical decisions, all the while everyone is working crazy hours and still far behind. We are demotivated.
  • Strategy is often in the things you decide not to do.
  • We simply must stop shipping incomplete products that aren’t ready for the end user. It is hurting our brand tremendously. It takes guts to not allow a product to launch that may be 90% ready with a quarter end in sight, but it will pay off in the long term.
  • The truth is, no one in RIM dares to tell management how bad our tools still are. Even our closest dev partners do their best to say it politely, but they will never bite the hand that feeds them.
  • 25 million iPad users don’t care that it doesn’t have Flash or true multitasking, so why make that a focus in our campaigns? I’ll answer that for you: it’s because that’s all that differentiates our products and its lazy marketing. I’ve never seen someone buy product B because it has something product A doesn’t have. People buy product B because they want and lust after product B.
  • RIM has a lot of people who underperform but still stay in their roles. No one is accountable. Where is the guy responsible for the 9530 software? Still with us, still running some important software initiative. We will never achieve excellence with this culture. Just because someone may have been a loyal RIM employee for 7 years, it doesn’t mean they are the best Manager / Director / VP for that role.
  • However, overconfidence clouds good decision-making. We missed not boldly reacting to the threat of iPhone when we saw it in January over four years ago. We laughed and said they are trying to put a computer on a phone, that it won’t work.
  • Reach out to all employees asking them on how we can make RIM better. Encourage input from ground-level teams—without repercussions—to seek out honest feedback and really absorb it.

All of these are examples of what happens in almost every business culture I have witnessed.  It is certainly not unique to RIM. If you think this is not happening within your business you are sorely mistaken.

What can you do….

  • Foster honest discussions.  Stop punishing those who do not follow the company line. Reward critical thought.  Ask people to do their homework prior to the meetings.
  • Listen.  Tap into the collective intelligence of the organization.  1,000 eyes see a lot.
  • Act out.  Stress your opinion if you have a dissenting idea.If you love your company and passionate about what you do, chances are your opinions probably do matter.
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Categories : Change Management, Communication, Culture of Action, Incentive Alignment, Innovation, Meeting Management, Operational Performance Management, Process Improvement

Focus on Operational Performance Management

26 05 2009

When was the last time you discussed how your customers were performing?  Do you have a formula to determine their lifetime revenue potential?  And what it costs to serve them?  Does this determine how you segment and market to your customers?  Do your sales people use this value as a tool in the negotiation of price?

Basically how do you manage customer performance?

One of my clients was a credit card processing shop and what we found was that they were spending $4 for every $1 they were collecting from bad debts.  While it was not the whole story, it was evident that we needed to better understand the customer lifecycle.  This client did have specific marketing programs and processes, but they had not been challenged in quite some time and were common industry practices.  

What we find out when we look at commonly held beliefs is that their assumptions are no longer (if they ever were) valid.  We get into a groove of momentum that we find difficult to change our beliefs and behaviors.  We also lack a mechanism and the focus to understand which processes to look at.  One of the most critical to me is around customer performance.  

Ask yourself if you know which customers are driving profits and which are destroying them?  If not, this might be the best place to start thinking about improving insight and process improvement.


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Categories : Culture of Action, Customer Value, Operational Performance Management, Process Improvement

Because you can…doesn’t mean you should

14 04 2009

We do a number of things in the name of business intelligence.  We say we have to have real time information.  We have to have hundreds of reports.  We have to be able to look at everything in every direction.

Business Intelligence software promises us this and make this seem like an achievable goal.  And yes it would be great to know everything about everything and get a perfect 360 degree view of the organization.

Yet it is not really achievable, actually not even close.  Instead ask what are the goals & objectives of the organization, and how does this support that end.  We are very quick to say “we can do that” but we need to temper that with “why should we do that?”  Think of the goal of a dashboard – to providereal-time information on a specific subject.  I have known many managers that constantly stare at the screen to see if anything moved.  

What we really need is to understand how to use the function of time and integrate that into a analytical management process.  What would you get more out of, a tactical dial that shows us one KPI, or a meeting at the end of the day to review a number of KPIs?


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Categories : Analytics & Business Intelligence, Culture of Action, Meeting Management, Operational Performance Management, Process Improvement

Scalability as a KPI

7 03 2009

One item that companies should do a better job with is understand departmental scalability.  Are the company grows, do each of the departments grow with the same scale?  Does finance not scale because of compliance and risk, or because of broken processes?  How do we know if we can’t track Revenue / Departmental Headcount over time?

And if we do start to do a better job tracking metrics like this, doesn’t this give us greater insight as to where the organization gets the most bang for the buck?  As well as give us a defensible rational to defend against empire building for personal reasons?

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Categories : KPI, Operational Performance Management, Performance Management

Defining Operational Performance Management (OPM)

12 02 2009

OPM is part of a number of buzzwords within the industry that is often used, yet poorly defined. While it is part of a the Performance Management family (which is also overused, generally accepted, yet not well defined). For us to make the niche more credible it is important to have a generally accepted definition of what it means.

I have tried to frame OPM as a methodology, a framework, a process in which the focus is upon creating value with the customer in mind. Where Financial Performance Management strives to improve the budget development and budget management processes to enhance shareholder value, OPM takes us beyond the constraints of the financial mindset. We need to look at the processes and initiatives that drive customer value creation. Processes and initiatives like sales and marketing, operations, supply chain, pricing and discounting, etc.

It is clear these two legs (OPM & FPM) must work together, and one should not take priority at the expense of the other. All to often our budgetary process becomes our measure of success, even though it is a lagging indicator. Where OPM becomes particularly valuable is that if we are building customer value correctly, it leads to greater financial results. Are we better off to hit our budgets in a year when the market was wildly successful? If the market grew at 10%, yet one grows at their budgeted 8% – was management successful?




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Categories : Analytics & Business Intelligence, Operational Performance Management, Performance Management