For any organization to perform and compete successfully, it must have the systems and processes in place to translate goals into achievable actions-and measure and monitor results. Moreover, the organization must be able to adjust and adapt as market conditions, government regulations, personnel, and other variables evolve, sometimes gradually and sometimes dramatically. In Delivering Results: Measuring What Matters, Babson College professors and management consultants, Lawrence Carr and Alfred Nanni, take a holistic systems approach to organizational management, with an emphasis on aligning internal resources, in the context of the external environment, to achieve goals with little wasted effort or energy. The primary active mechanism in this approach is communication. Using feedback, a manager may measure the magnitudes of strategically-important performance improvements, assess causes and effects, learn how to make effective improvements, and motivate people to take actions that lead to those improvements. But only when all the parts of the management system line up can feedback be harnessed to encourage behavior that delivers strategic results.

Ultimately, promoting strategic behavior is the objective of system design. First and foremost, delivering results depends upon influencing employees' behavior. The term "management system"-something that measures results and reports activities-sounds mechanistic, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Delivering Results, from the organization's perspective, is not merely measuring and reporting; instead, it is the amalgamation of all the decisions made and all the actions taken by the organization's people. Thus a management system is more about human judgment than quantitative analysis.

The authors acknowledge that the challenge of designing and implementing an effective management system can be daunting for several reasons:

• Different strategies call fordifferent competencies.

• Specific competitive environments may reorder the priorities of these competencies.

• The professional model may determine how an organization operates.

• Leadership styles influence behavior.

• Variations in organizational structures can lead to dissimilar strategic opportunities or limits within an organization.

• Information technology can enhance or limit the flow of necessary data.

• Skills and knowledge change over time.

• No two people are exactly the same.

Illustrating their concepts with numerous examples, the authors demonstrate that managers who can navigate these variables and chart a route for their own organization's strategy will reach their goals faster and more efficiently than their competitors. Knowing how to create and direct management systems that deliver results is, in itself, a strategic resource.

Autorentext

Lawrence P. Carr is Professor of Management Accounting at Babson College. He teaches in the Graduate School of Business and the School of Executive Education. His courses include Measuring and Achieving Strategic Results, Management Planning and Control, Strategic Cost Systems and Managing and Measuring Performance. He has served as the Dean of the Graduate School, Curriculum Coordinator for the first year MBA program, and has received the Kennedy Award and the Dean's Award for teaching excellence. He is a management consultant and has published over thirty articles and fifteen teaching cases, and is a co-author of Total Quality Management: A Cross-Functional Perspective, Guide to Cost Management.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Carr spent eighteen years in industry. For eight years he was a Division Controller and Vice President for Kollmorgen Corporation, a publicly held diversified electronics company. As President and CEO of OSRAM, Corp., the U.S. and Canadian subsidiary of OSRAM GmbH, part of Siemens, he developed and managed the dramatic growth (over 31% per year) of this lighting company for eight years. He led the corporation as it established distribution systems and centers, developed a manufacturing facility in the U.S., introduced new product lines to the market and executed two acquisitions.

Dr. Carr earned a BA in Psychology from Marist College, an MA in Industrial Administration, an MBA and a Ph.D. from Union College. His consulting clients include Fidelity, Heinz, Accenture, GE, IBM, Siemens, Pitney-Bowes, Xerox, and others. He has been published in Management Accounting, The Journal of Cost Management, Strategic Performance Measurement, International Journal of Strategic Cost Management and Sloan Management Review.

Alfred J. Nanni, Jr., is Professor of Management Accounting and Vander Wolk Chair in Management Accounting & Operational Performance at Babson College. His central research interest is performancemeasurement and strategy execution. He has written a wide variety of articles within this research domain for both academic and practitioner audiences. He is co-author, with J. Robb Dixon and Thomas E. Vollman, of The New Performance Challenge: Measuring Operations for World-Class Competition. Dr. Nanni has also consulted extensively on strategic cost and performance measurement with large manufacturing and service firms.

At Babson College, Professor Nanni has taught in the undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs. He was, until 1999, the original Director of the Intermediate Management Core Program, Babson's innovative multi-disciplinary, multi-year core business program for undergraduates. Prior to his arrival at Babson College, Dr. Nanni held positions at the Pennsylvania State University College of Business Administration, and Boston University School of Management. At Boston University, he was Chair of the Accounting Department as well as Director of the Accounting Doctoral Program. Professor Nanni earned a BA (cum laude) from Syracuse University and a M.S., B.A., Ph.D., from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Inhalt
I: Delivering Results Strategy and Execution.- Management as a System.- The Key to Delivering Results.- II: Delivering Results The Operational Context.- Delivering Results Context.- Organizational Fitness: Culture and Values.- Internal Strategy: Governance Structure.- Internal Strategy: Organizational Structure.- III: Measuring What Matters.- Performance Measurement Systems.- Aligning the MSDR Measurement System with Strategy.- Gaining Strategic Alignment.- Performance and Rewards.- Management as a System: Executing Strategy Through the MSDR.