3 out of 4 stars
Share This Review
Every company or organization exists for a particular purpose. To achieve this purpose, the leadership of any institution must be adept at making big decisions and selecting the right course of action from several options that will drive the organization in the right direction. This leadership-focused book lays out a management assessment system to help identify how an organization’s leadership measures performance based on the institution’s objective. Where this assessment finds an ineffective strategy for measuring performance or doesn’t find any, the authors give recommendations for improving or creating the performance measurement strategy. The feedback from this process helps to improve decision-making within the organization.
Bryan Shane and Patricia Lafferty show how a performance measurement strategy considers the cogency of an organization’s undertakings in terms of its client/customer satisfaction, financial outlook, employee satisfaction, projects being handled, etc. They then proffer some ready-to-use diagnostic tools, case studies, and diagrams to provide people in leadership with a step-by-step process for setting up or improving their organization’s performance measurement systems.
This was an enlightening read for me. Bryan and Patricia wrote The Leadership-Driven Method to Performance Measurement with a focus on improving performance for both public businesses and non-profit organizations. The authors of this book showed confidence in the methods they prescribed in its pages, having validated it themselves throughout the thirty years of their consulting practices. I appreciated that this book wasn’t just theory—the fact that the authors were writing from experiential knowledge made it easier for me to accept what they were saying. It also made me more willing to apply the nuggets of wisdom they gave in my own little capacity to meet business goals.
The length of the book and the level of detail in the authors’ writings mean that readers may not digest everything after reading the book once. Executives, managers, and heads of departments can refer back to it occasionally to help them improve their business’s growth. While Patricia and Bryan gave out so much detail in this book, they made sure to write in simple language and avoid unnecessary jargon and technical terms. I also appreciated the inclusion of actual case studies of other businesses to show the success of their assessment system. The diagrams included also helped drive home some of the authors’ most salient points in a way that words could not.
Sometimes, an author can go overboard in a bid to be as detailed as possible—this was the case with this book. While they did not leave any stone unturned in their explanations, they sadly fell into the trap of repetition several times throughout the text. They sometimes also took too long to make a point; it felt like they were trying to make the book lengthy just for the sake of it. For instance, there was a table of contents and a content guide, both of which repeated almost the same information in different formats. Some statements were also rephrased severally throughout the book.
This book was exceptionally well-edited—I didn’t find a single case of grammar misuse. I rate it 3 out of 4 stars because of how informative and easy to read the book was—it would have deserved a full rating if not for the unnecessary repetitions. I recommend it to anyone currently serving or preparing to serve in a leadership role in any business or organization.
******
The Leadership Driven Method to Performance Measurement
View: on Bookshelves | on Amazon
