Performance Controller

"However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results"...WC Print

In the competency stakes there are several stages to achieving mastery. To understand this is to understand your value and what you must do to maintain it. As you become more capable the ground will likely shift as you realize what it means.

Consider the cobbler starting as an apprentice. When he begins his indentures, even the smallest task needs someone to teach him the skills. He is understandably quite unaware of how to even approach competency, let alone what it may look like.

You might say he is unconsciously incompetent. But his next stage, not surprisingly, is being conscious of his incompetence as he accepts, on faith, what his mentor and teachers say he still needs to know.

Once he develops skills he moves to an unconscious state once again as he makes it. But it still takes time and effort for it to sink in that he is is actually there. Consciousness does not return until the next emancipating stage clicks in, which may well be the point that sees him graduating as a qualified craftsman.

But what of the final stage to achieve mastery?

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Recently, I was helping a business understand some proposals offering services for implementation of management performance reports together with analytics capability. What we found, at the end of the day, was unit pricing was the major “criteria” for selection of implementers, regardless of the application, solution, experience and confidence in making the project successful.

If you have ever been to a doctor, which choice would at the end of the day cost you more? An experienced doctor or a “fresh” out of college doctor? For a doctor rookie, stomach ache could come from various causes, so to make his assumptions solid, he will send you to do several lab testes, which more or less would be included in the final bill. Compare this to an experienced doctor who’s been in the field for a long time. He could almost conclude (from conversations and statistical background of the area and patients behavior) the likelihood of the cause without the need for lab tests.

Another example is in the construction business. Which choice would cost you more between an experienced carpenter and a plumber who also said he can do the carpenter’s job? A construction friend of mine tells me that for every project he handles, he only relies on experienced workers, for in the long run it costs him less. Being able to manage parallel tasks and calculating the amount of concrete and finishing the project within the deadline is the critical requirements that can’t be learnt from college.

Although the solution cost seems cheaper while only measuring from the proposed price, experience tells me that they’ve made the wrong decision and will have to pay the price.

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In a context of  understanding the next generation of performance management thinking, to overcome behavioral change barriers using social networks, a recent Wikinomics debate on relationship limits got my interest.

This debate asks the question:

If its true our neocortex has a finite limit to have only approximately 150 meaningful relationships, then what is social networking achieving? Read more…

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As we focus on making it all happen it is easy to forget to enjoy the lighter side of life. Just to kept it in perspective. “The Ride of Your Life” by George Carlin is worth taking time out and reading every day.

George Carlin’s view on ageing is brilliant. He Begins with a question.

Do you realize the only time in our lives when we like to get old is when we’re kids?

 

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This story has been around a while but always worth recanting.

Bruce Sansome, Chairman of Natex Engineering Group in Australian shared this with a TEC Group in Melbourne recently.

As a  lightheaded refocus he prefaced saying

"When things in your lives seem almost too much to handle, when 24 hours in a day are not enough, remember the mayonnaise jar and the 2 cups of coffee."

Here is the story:

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With limited time available in the quest for productivity, we multi task. Or do we? If this is not true what is it that we do?

Multi-tasking I just learned it  is a myth. Something you do when you drive home and then wonder who drove.

This week I found I was challenged as I juggled my priorities and my personal life.  Having already reduced my to-do list to something sensible, it still looked foreboding.

To make it worse,  the unforeseen political agenda in Thailand where I have been doing business this month has thrown normality into chaos. Plus,  my daughter just announced she was arriving early to  visit me this week from her India trip, before we then head home to Australia together next week .

So it was time to step up my skill in multi tasking.  But before I did I decided to do some research on just what that was.

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