+44 (0)20 8642 9568 Contact Us

News from the attic: The performance measurement manifesto

This News from the attic is taken from Harvard Business Review Jan-Feb 1991, when Robert Eccles published “The performance measurement manifesto”. Eccles advocates the use of measures additional to the conventional accounting ones then predominantly in use (and still dominant today), adding quality, customer satisfaction and benchmarking among others to the list .A year later, Kaplan and Norton published their article on the balanced scorecard, which took the idea still further.

In view of the current furore over bankers’ bonuses and the high rates of pay given to chief executives, little seems to have changed over the last 20 years. Eccles notes that “what gets measured gets attention, particularly when rewards are tied to the measures”. He continues, “formulas that tie incentives to performance look objective and rarely work.”

To come up to date, this month a new book by Will Hutton has been published “Them and Us: Changing Britain - Why We Need a Fair Society”. Hutton has things to say about relative reward – not that all should be paid the same, but that there are fundamental notions of fairness by which relative reward should be judged. Reward needs to be proportionate and should not be judged by only internal financial measures. I like to think that Robert Eccles would have approved.

Calvert Markham