Management Excellence

Most business people would be familiar with the concept of operational excellence, but it turns out this is not enough anymore to make a strategic difference. Competitive advantage is no longer achieved by just eliminating cost while improving quality and increasing speed. Competitive advantage comes from being smart, agile, and aligned.


Creating management excellence is the goal of performance management. It has
many angles, so the journal will have many topics to address. Although the
editorial calendar for the coming quarters is still flexible, themes that come to mind
are sustainability, how to organize for performance management, performance
management methodologies, and creating business value, etc.


But what do we call the management process? When we ask this to customers and
audiences all around the world, the answer is either silence, or a flurry of different
activities and partial processes such as budgeting, financial reporting, resource
management, and variance analysis, etc. The closest thing people mention to
describe their management process is the PDCA-cycle (Plan, Do, Check, Adjust).
This cycle is sometimes also called the planning and control cycle, or management
cycle. Sometimes it involves more steps, but it is always based on this principle.
It is concerning, almost scary, that the management processes are not as clearly
defined as business processes, as the competitive advantage that organizations can
have is increasingly dependent on the management process, instead of business
processes. Most organizations have done a terrific job in driving cost out of the
process while optimizing the quality of the products and services they offer. Then
again, most organizations have done that. Operational excellence is not a
differentiator anymore; it has become a license to just play. For winning, more is
needed. Organizations that make a difference are smart, agile and aligned.