In this book, the authors examine 40 tools and practices through five perspectives of performance management: strategic planning, shareholder and customer value, lean cost management, performance measurement, and performance evaluation.

This chapter defines performance management and best practices, and describes types of best practice, how to apply best practices, and the importance of adopting best practices.

This chapter discusses where to start when implementing a performance management methodology, and reiterates that there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of where to start. The starting point could depend on which of the performance management methodologies provide the fastest significant return. This chapter also addresses the importance of buy-in.

This chapter defines benchmark as a standard of performance and looks at benchmarking as a way for an organization to determine where it stands in relation to other organizations.

These sections describe types of benchmarking and the four-phase benchmarking methodology (Plan, Collect, Analyze and Report, and Adapt and Improve) proposed by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC).

This chapter looks at challenges and issues faced by organizations when trying to resolve conflicts between financial targets and budgets, and principles of sustainability. It offers a broad vision of corporate sustainability and ways to rethink management practices that benefit an organization and have positive social and environmental impacts.

These chapters present leadership practices for sustainability champions and a seven-step sustainability change. This reading also describes the differences between unsustainable and sustainable companies, and addresses the big four sustainability challenges: energy and climate change, food and water, waste and toxicity, and poverty and social justice.

This reading focuses on achieving strategic goal effectiveness by planning performance and managing execution of the strategic plan, which relates to execution performance. It provides context to inform the second part of Lesson 2, which addresses the importance of strategy execution.

Strategy execution is an important management topic that helps us understand what needs to be done to drive business results. Two mainstream approaches to strategy execution are strategy execution as a process and strategy execution as a system.

This chapter introduces the concept of an office for strategy management, analyzes why companies may need such an office, and describes some of the roles and responsibilities associated with it. In addition, it presents case studies that show how some organizations have implemented an office of strategy management.