Performance management guide for businesses

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The competitive edge of modern-day business emerges from creation or discovery of a performance management. A system that increases efficiency, decreases cost or enhances quality confers immediate competitive advantage on its creator and sets a standard for the rest of the industry to follow. But once disseminated across the field of competition, it becomes the standard. Now a new, yet more innovative, high performance system must be discovered that once more creates competitive advantage for its inventors. Performance management competitive edge

Henry Ford used scientific management as the foundation of his engineered, moving assembly line and created the next phase in performance management a phase that has dominated most of the twentieth century. science, human relations theory, which campaigned first as the human relations movement, then in the guises of a quality of work life movement, participative management rhetoric and a variety of guerrilla thrusts under the battle cry of motivation theory. The Ford system, though, was too robust to yield to mere humanistic rhetoric. Indeed, the sheer success of Ford's personal vision of scientific management raised Western productivity to unparalleled heights and rendered America the "arsenal of democracy" in World War II. Simple management humanism could hardly compete with that. Henry Ford used scientific management

As the twentieth century eases toward closure, there are indications that new performances are growing. Somehow, they seem to cannibalize the best from old systems to weave the new. They leave behind the lock-step work flow of the engineered assembly process and abandon the narrow specialization of work that characterized it. In its place there is flexibility for the system to redesign itself around a multi skilled work force, trained and empowered to make production decisions formerly reserved solely for production engineers. This is one current variety of emerging performance system. But it is probably only one of many new kinds of performance management systems with potential to emerge in this age. Indeed, the pace of technological change may open the door to a variety of performance systems, each suited to its particular industry or market, each with its own character. Management in the twenty-first century

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