Make Success Measurable!: A Mindbook-Workbook for Setting Goals and Taking Action

"Performance begins with focusing on outcomes instead of activities. In my experience, most people in most organizations most of the time do the reverse. They concentrate their efforts on the pursuit of activities instead of outcomes. As a result, they rarely set or achieve performance results that matter."

Today's performance challenges demand outcomes-both financial and nonfinancial-that must simultaneously benefit customers, shareholders, employees, and management. Therein lies a cycle of sustainable performance that functions as a framework to ensure your organization's goals are set, met, and balanced for today's business world.

Make Success Measurable! enables you to avoid activity-based goals that can go on indefinitely, and articulate aggressive outcome-based goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

This is a how-to book, emphasizing outcomes as opposed to actions in setting goals. You'll learn how to: Set goals that matter to customers, shareholders, and funders. Set nonfinancial as well as financial goals and link them together. Understand and use outcome-based goals that support success while avoiding activity-based goals that produce failure. Select and use management disciplines needed to achieve your goals. Smith provides the what's and why's behind today's performance challenges and shows how to convert them into measurable concrete achievements.

Using an innovative approach, Smith divides each chapter into an explanatory Mindbook section and a practice Workbook section. The Mindbook sections provide descriptions and explain key concepts, frameworks, tools, and techniques. They seek to build your intellectual understanding of how to set and achieve the performance goals that matter.

The Workbook sections include detailed examples and exercises that you and your colleagues can use to practice the concepts, tools, and techniques put forth in the Mindbook section. Workbook exercises allow you to convert understanding into action-and action into results! "Doug Smith's work on performance and measurement has been an invaluable management resource for us. We believe that if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. Thanks to Doug, we can focus on the right measures to drive performance against today's many new and different challenges throughout our enterprise."-Leon Gorman, President, L.L. Bean, Inc.

"Make Success Measurable! is a practical and powerful step-by-step guide to setting and achieving the goals we all need to accomplish in a constantly changing and challenging world."-Charles Dolan, Chairman, Cablevision Systems Corporation.

"No one writes as clearly about today's key management issues as Doug Smith. Whether you're in a small eCommerce startup or a large, already established organization, the frameworks, tools, techniques, and exercises contained in this book are the only things you'll need to manage the performance that matters to your customers, your people, and your shareholders."-Steve Goldstein, CEO, eChores and former CEO, American Express Bank.

"Achieving results that matter-to donors and clients-is the true measure of success for any nonprofit organization. This book provides a thoughtful and extremely practical guide for setting goals and effectively meeting them. It is an absolutely indispensable tool for leaders and a model for good management."-Jenna Dorn, President, National Museum of Health.

Table of Contents:
Focus on Outcomes, Not Activities.

Pick Relevant Metrics.

Get Specific.

Beyond Stretch: Injecting Creative and Personal Tension into Goals.

Beyond Jobs: Pick Outcomes That Fit Your Working Arenas.

Coordinate Your Goals with the Goals of Others.

Integrate Financial and Nonfinancial Goals.

Small Group Performance: Working Group versus Team Management Disciplines.

Organizationwide Performance: Vertical versus Horizontal Management Disciplines.

Performance and Change: Decision-Driven versus Behavior-Driven Management Disciplines.

Putting It All Together: Manage Your Organization for Performance.

Appendix.

Index.

About the Author :
DOUGLAS K. SMITH is an internationally recognized author and consultant on organization performance, innovation, and change. He is coauthor of The Wisdom of Teams and author of Taking Charge of Change. His work on teams and organizational performance has been featured in Business Week, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Harvard Business Review, and the McKinsey Quarterly.