Performance Measures that Worked – A Case Study From Major League Baseball

Would you rather watch the video than read?  If so, just click here.  4 mins with captions.

Managers introduce measures because they’re paid to get results…and often it goes nowhere.  This is a case study of where it worked, and it comes from Major League Baseball.

Baseball – Balls and Strikes

First – the game of baseball.  Robin Williams said…

…so baseball is like test cricket on speed.

While you might know baseball as hitting, fielding and running around the bases to score runs, the key moment happens over 300 times a game when the pitchers throws (‘pitches’) the ball to the hitter.  If not put into play, each pitch is a ball or a strike.  Three strikes and you’re out, four balls mean you get to go to first base.

Stepping Up to Senior Management – Your New Kettle Of Fish

If you’d like to watch me go through this on video, just click here.  6 mins with captions.

Senior Management is not just more management.  It’s a new kettle of fish.  I’ll go through:

• The change in the nature of the work
• What the job actually is
• Action To Take

Senior Management

First – what are we talking about here?  The key thing is manager of managers.  Or, managers of multiple teams, who each have their own leadership.  These roles can be called various things, some of the ones from my clients are:

Innovation – What It Really Is and What Makes It Work

You can watch this on video if you’d prefer to see me go through it rather than read.

Innovation.  We all know it.  There’s a fair chance it’s even one of your ‘values’. 

What makes a huge difference to success in this area is understanding what we really are doing, and what we need to look at for it to work.

Luc Hoebeke’s Work Domains

My go-to person in this field is Luc Hoebeke – brilliant thinker and consultant from Belgium who wrote a wonderful book Making Work Systems Better, which he kindly made available on the internet (click the link).

Luc gives us a way to look at work using what he calls domains.  It’s kind of hierarchical in that each later domain provides the conditions for the earlier domain to exist…but not hierarchical as you know it, because each domain is also it’s own complete system.   They don’t ‘manage’ each other.

Some Radical Common Sense

School holidays means the chance for me to hang out with my kids, so the next video will be out next week. (I’ll be covering innovation – what it is, what you need to keep an eye on to make it work.)

So this week, it’s just some radical common sense to ponder…

Work is all about relationships. This is because everyone is producing something for someone. There’s no choice in this. So get better at getting along with people.

Work is all about delivering something. This is because everyone is producing something for someone. There’s no choice in this. So get better at producing whatever you are producing.