Business Development Metrics

• Strategic Engineering -  the top down articulation of objectives and measures by management, cascading to lower levels and ensuring systems and processes are in place to get the results you want
• Strategic Anarchy - get management out of the way and let people do what they know the business needs.  Encourage loose organization, social networks, decentralization of control, etc.

The question posed in his post is, is there a midpoint that gets the best results? In our work with clients, we have seen these two approaches employed to some degree in tandem in many companies.

The top-down strategy execution approach from management uses traditional Strategy Maps, Balanced Scorecards, Briefing Books, and Structured Business Reviews. Its success depends on how well (not how thoroughly) it is engineered and implemented.

Although rarely at the level of “Strategic Anarchy,” most organizations do try to measure their people on what they do, how they improve, and what they contribute. Often, the “Annual Goals” and review process are used for this purpose.
Done well, this review process should link to the top-down strategic goals and allow “those who know” to pursue new, different, and/or entrepreneurial approaches that might have future value.  This could range from redesigning a mundane process through the year, to the type of work done at organizations like Google and 3M, encouraging employees to work on pet projects that may or may not pay off for the organization in the future.

Ideally, this process would feed back into the top-down approach to modify the “engineered” strategy based on employee innovations, ideas, and process improvements.

So the trick seems to involve first doing both top down and bottom up performance management really well.

Then you can connect the two by doing the following:

1. Make the corporate strategic goals and measures clear to all employees
2. Make very clear who is responsible for what
3. In a real and meaningful way, link employee goals to those corporate goals
4. Encourage employees to have other goals (less formally linked perhaps) on their personal list of objectives
5. Regularly review corporate goals at a management level, and employee goals with individual employees
6. Feedback employee innovations, observations, suggestions, etc. during regular structured business reviews.

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