What went wrong

In this course you will shadow Emma, the new General Manager at CM Tech, to explore various aspects of business performance management topics related to organizational development and performance management in a real world context. CM Tech is a fictional company but we will bring it to life in this course.  CM Tech is a multinational organization that manufactures computer components.  You and Emma will focus on driving business strategy throughout the organization through performance objectives, organization structures, and management processes.  You will also be tasked with managing the performance of teams and individuals towards the achievement of performance objectives.  In other words, you have a lot to do. So, why should we partner with Emma and why study performance management at all?  Working with Emma provides us a glimpse into how all these concepts work in a real world environment.  Rather than simply exploring concepts, we get to explore the materials within the context of real world situations which helps us more readily grasp and apply what we are learning in our own work and life situations.  Completing this course will arm you with the knowledge and insights necessary as an employee or manager to appreciate and support a successful performance management program. In our first week we will dip our toes in the water with a look at several introductory topics.  We’ll see the history of “new” management theories, look to the future to see what we think might be coming next, and look at the most common things organizations do wrong which almost ensures their employees will perform poorly.  Wait a minute, why look at all the horror stories on what not to do?  Well to see what not to do and why.  Unfortunately the world around us provides us with lots of examples of what not to do.  To combine two of our key chapters I’ll share some of Emma’s experiences at CM Tech with you.  CM Tech is a mature organization that has been in operation for over 30 years.  They have faced many challenges of course and have done their best to evolve over time, keeping up with the many “new” developments you will read about in Chapter 3.  Continuous improvement has been a repeating theme over the last thirty years and CM Tech has tried hard to keep up.  They tried to implement a Total Quality Management (TQM) system many years ago with some success.  After the TQM initial success faded they worked on lean manufacturing, Six Sigma, implemented a Balanced Scorecard, and more.  While all of them worked to a degree, over time the employees that had long tenure began to lose interest in each “new” thing that came along. The lesson that Emma emphasizes from all of the “new” things introduced to their employees was that there were various reasons for overall failure or reduced success in each project.  The team didn’t take the time to look back and see the reasons for their failures so they were condemned to repeat the same mistakes each time a new project or management philosophy came along.  Over time the employees developed an expectation of failure and reduced their efforts to buy into each new thing that came along.  Emma emphasizes the need to look back and what they did wrong just as we’ll see in our reading.  She also emphasizes the importance of each new management philosophy that has developed and how important each can be to an organization’s evolution if properly implemented.  So there is a lot we can learn from history even when things go poorly. Our assignments and discussions will focus on our materials but not in a conceptual manner.  Let’s take what we learn a step further and try to see it at work in a real world environment.  We’ll use CM Tech (again, a fictitious company.) as our playground to explore and apply our concepts in our discussions and our weekly assignments.  You are also encouraged to look at your own professional environment and see how our concepts apply.  Look at the history of your organization or your previous employers.  Can you see any of the management breakthroughs such as TQM or the Balanced Scorecard at work around you now or in the past?  What about the rules for poor performance?  Is your organization guilty of any of the missteps explained in our opening chapter that are almost sure to demotivate any good employee?  Try on your imagination for size.  What might be the next new big thing in management?  Maybe your company is particularly progressive and you see something already at work that you think will be the next ‘big thing’.  The concepts we learn will have far more meaning and stick with us a lot longer when we can see them in our own environment or in a fun real (well, kind of) world situation like CM Tech.