Harvard Business Review on Measuring Corporate Performance (Harvard Business Review Paperback Series)

This is one in a series of several dozen volumes which comprise the "Harvard Business Review Paperback Series." Each offers direct, convenient, and inexpensive access to the best thinking on the given subject in articles originally published by the Harvard Business Review. I strongly recommend all of the volumes in the series. The individual titles are listed at this Web site: www.hbsp.harvard.edu. The authors of various articles are among the world's most highly regarded experts on the given subject. All of the volumes have been carefully edited. An Executive Summary introduces each selection. Supplementary commentaries are also provided in most of the volumes, as is an "About the Contributors" section which usually includes suggestions of other sources which some readers may wish to explore.

Truer now than ever before, "you can't manage what you can't measure." However, four questions must first be answered:

1. What do I need to know?
2. Why do I need to know it?
3. How can I verify what I think I have learned?
4. How will I then use what I have learned?

What we have in this volume are eight articles, several of which later developed into best-selling business books. For example, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton co-authored three of articles in this volume in which they introduce the concept of the balanced scorecard, suggest "measures that drive performance, explain how to put the balanced scoreboard to work, and then how to use it as a strategic management system. They then co-authored several books in which they developed these and other core concepts in much greater depth. My personal favorite is The Strategy-Focused Organization.

The lead article by Peter F. Drucker ("The Information Executives Truly Need to Know") was originally published in the Harvard Business Review (January-February 1995, Reprint 95104). True, many of Drucker's ideas have since been recycled in several of his books but so what? I found so much in this article to highlight with my trusty optic yellow Accent pen that I eventually needed two of them. Drucker focuses on the tools executives require to generate the information they need....and the concepts underlying those tools. "The new tools enable us -- indeed may force us -- to see our businesses differently" as "generators of resources, as links in an economic chain, as society's organs for the creation of wealth, and as both creatures and creators of a material environment." Great stuff.

The titles of the other articles give you some idea of what their authors have to say about measuring corporate performance: Robert G. Eccles' "The Corporate Manifesto," Joseph A. Ness and Thomas G. Cucuzza's "Tapping the Full Potential of ABC" (i.e. activity-based management), Robert Simons and Antonio Dávila's "How High Is Your Return on Management?," and Christopher Myers' "How the Right Measures Help Teams Excel." The volume concludes with the three Kaplan-Norton articles.

As is each of the others in the HBR series, this volume is essentially a primer on cutting-edge thinking about an especially important business subject. Yes, much of the material is generic. No, it doesn't offer a cohesive, comprehensive, and cost-effective system for corporate performance measurement. But I presume to suggest that any one of the eight articles (all by itself) is worth far more than the cost of this book. Obviously, I highly recommend it. In fact, I think every decision-maker should read all of the volumes in the HBR series and then re-visit relevant portions in them (previously highlighted, of course) on an as-needed basis.

If you have read The Essential Drucker, Balanced scorecard etc. , the book essentially has the same information repeated under a different title. Recommend Essential Drucker, Balanced Score card which is more comprehensive than this title.

This collection of eight articles from the HBR is a must IF AND ONLY IF you want the only highlights of some of the new management tools and theories out there. If you've ever wondered what Activity-Based Costing (ABC) is or what Kaplan's "Balanced Scorecard" is all about, this may be just the introductory text for you. I mention these two tools first since 2 out of 8 articles deal with ABC, either in whole or in part, while another 3 deal specifically with the balanced scorecard. So, if you've got ABC and the balanced scorecard already firmly laid out in your head, this may be a bit redundant.

The remaining three articles are still worth a quick read though. I found in one article, "How the Right Measures Help Teams Excel," ideas that I hadn't seen anywhere else (for example, the team "dashboard"). And, the "How High is Your Return on Management?" article might give managers a moment of reflection on whether or not they have a good ROM and what they can do to improve it.

As I stated before, much of this is merely highlights though. Do not expect to be able to use this book as a primary source to implement any of the measures. It's a tease that gets you excited (at least it did me), but doesn't provide much of a game plan for bringing it all about.

Still, if what you want is a quick overview and a few case studies where these principles and tools have been applied, by all means, read this. It's worth at least that much.

Looking for some informative, original and clear thinking about measuring performance? This book is a great choice! This is a collection of eight outstanding articles selected from past editions of the HBR. The articles cover such subjects as activity-based costing, the use of nonfinancial criteria, and tools executives require to generate the information needed. Each article begins with an executive summary which, for the fast-forward crowd, is a big plus.

So many books are merely ONE GOOD ARTICLE embedded in a thicket of verbiage. Chopping away through such a jungle of verbosity for the gist-of-it-all often proves tedious and disappointing. (Blessed are the laconic!) This book, on the other hand, just serves up a bunch of 'gists' -the pure meat and potatoes of ideas. Happily, the HBSP has published several other collections of this sort on such topics as knowledge management, change, and strategies for growth. Each of these is collection of first-rate 'gists'. Reviewed by Gerry Stern, founder, Stern & Associates, author of Stern's Sourcefinder The Master Directory to HR and Business Management Information & Resources, Stern's CyberSpace SourceFinder, and the Compensation and Benefits SourceFinder.

This is a vey useful books as a reprints of HBR and catagorized on the corporate reviews of companies, with big part on the famous balanced scoeboard, and a nice section on team performance. But this is not suiatble for small companies review system which i m looking for. If what you r looking for is a way of seeing hhow company performs and you r in big corporation, this is an exellent books as other HBR reprints books that now availabe at many formats... definitely 5 stars.

tanadi santoso