How awesome leaders hack their tools

Today I bring you a poem I wished I had written myself. It's author, Jeremy Hope, was an influential leader and co-founder of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table (BBRT)—a global knowledge-sharing members organisation that helps visionary leaders and courageous companies achieve performance the right way.

Don't Blame the Tools—It's How You Use Them
By Jeremy Hope

A range of tools and techniques has emerged over the past decade,
Designed to solve many of the problems that traditional management
made.
Advocates of these tools claim they can be powerful and effective,
What they mean is that tools should be more interconnected.
But system designers have to change their view,
Instead of dictating and directing what people do.
They need to rethink how the system works,
From the outside in and from customer first.

The major problem with most best practices and tools
Such as scorecards, benchmarks, plans, and other management jewels
Is that they are used as additional management controls
Within the traditional hierarchy with top-down roles.
The satisfaction scores struggle to strive
To get over three or four out of five,
Yet we spend millions on these tools each year
With patchy results and little cheer.

The problem is that many people are bemused
By a management model too often misused.
Attempts to improve the system are neutralized and lose their resistance
By the powerful antibodies of the command and control system.
Thus, if any proposed actions threaten those norms
The corporate immune system will ring the alarms.
That is why there is often such a gulf in clarity
Between the reefs and the rocks of rhetoric and reality.

It is interesting to note what one user said
When the budget was removed from around her head,
"The balance scorecard has been 'turbo-charged'"
Was written in letters bold and enlarged.
Empower and adapt are the words we'd choose
With more flexible models and multiple views.
More diversity is what we're aiming for
Different ways of thinking that open the door.

This poem—featured at the beginning of the book Beyond Performance Management^[1]—sets the tone for one of the few books I have dared to highlight and write notes at the margins. Both practical and profound, this book has been helping me become a better management innovator and consultant for more than a decade.

I hope reading Jeremy's words 'turbo-charge' you today!

If that's the case, here's one way to move away from command and control.

All best,
Alberto