What I thought was a normal Wednesday morning waking up on the road to spend a second day with a customer, was anything but. Turning on the TV news I am greeted with the headline that President-elect Obama is going to name a “Chief Performance Officer”. Blinking a few times, I realized that I was not hearing things.
Since publishing my book “Chief Performance Officer: Measuring What Matters, Managing What Can Be Measured”, I have been on a crusade to bring performance management the level of attention it needs in every organization. And now here is it, staring me in the face, front and center of the economic crisis.
Besides shock, I have to say I felt a sense of accomplishment. When I published my book in 2003, the term Chief Performance Officer, was new to the general business world. Now less than 5 years later, it could not be more mainstream than what I saw today in the news.
Throughout the day, I received calls from everyone from business peers to academic peers to the press. Many of the questions they had for me were the same nature:
“Did you have something to do with this?”
“How is a CPO going to work in an organization like the federal government?”
“Who will explain what a CPO is to the regular person on the street?”
“Can it really work?”
I wish I could say that I directly had something to do with President-elect Obama choosing a CPO, but I would say my impact is more indirect. As the evangelist of Chief Performance Officer, my goal was to get as many organizations to pay attention to performance at the Chief level. If the CEO (or President in this case) places the level of importance on performance to create a CPO, then the resources (systems, people, technology) will follow. I have worked with many organizations that have CPO’s, but may not call them CPO’s. So, the move to call out the title and create absolute accountability is bold. If only some of the private sector organizations would be so bold!
As I state in my book, though, a CPO without actions is not a CPO. There are great tools out there to find the performance issues in government (waste, spend leakage, human capital metrics, etc.) and our new CPO will need to use all these technological tools to MEASURE WHAT MATTERS. It is the second part of the equation, MANAGE WHAT CAN BE MEASURED, that will be the bigger challenge. That challenge involved competing organizations within the government, turf protection, lack of ability to act and massive changes in fiscal practices. Sure, technology will help with also, but much of it is going to be management from above, governance and accountability. Again, going to private sector successes, it is not insurmountable, but requires explicit control and direct cooperation.
It’s going to be long journey to measure and manage the performance, but the tools are there to make it happen as well as the need.
