Today it’s been stated that testing your DNA to assess your potential and how you should train to excel in sports is where sports nutrition used to be a couple of decades ago. On the plane the other night I read this article from Bicycling magazine and it’s really becoming mainstream practice to see where your athletic potential lies. Not so much for absolute levels but to find it relatively if you have fast or slow twitch muscles so you’d know better in what disciplines you could get really good and where you just genetically are already capped.

In business as a manager you do whatever you can to hire and develop your folks to grow into roles that you see a great fit for and have a real business need in. I think it’s safe to say that it would be a while before we figure out how to and allow ourselves to DNA test our colleagues and contractors to help assess their potential (pretty scary and far fetching thought right?!) to drive people performance.

But what is really at your hands as a manager though is to drive as much performance from your people as you possibly can no matter their genetic capability. No one wants to leave work feeling completely underwhelmed or go celebrate some work done if you don’t feel that you did your best. You are a coach and a manager that can and should set up for ultimate performance for your team members. Get your people to feel that they left all they had on the field that day. People want to perform and you as a manager no matter at what level – even when you manage and coach yourself – should set up for this.

A while ago I learned about some of the best research into how you actually drive real people performance. Learnings from high pressure organizations, sports, art and other high performance environments. Elkiem who has studied thousands of high performers and SF Research then recently partnered up to help accelerate their research findings into the hands of people that are accountable for driving people performance in their organizations – and who isn’t?

Look at this paper – Leaders Drive Productivity -  and get some insight on how you could drive better people performance from creating high performance environments  in your organization.

We’ve been talking about how companies can drive better results from better execution throughout the lifetime of this blog. With this launch of a new software category Business Execution Software we decided to explicitly rename this blog. Welcome to our new born or reincarnated Business Execution blog.

Lars, our founder and CEO, and I are working on our book Return on Execution©. You will find posts from the research and findings that we’ll share in the forthcoming book right here on the Business Execution blog. After all driving execution is what explains the financial performance of your company. Execution creates sustained competitive advantage. With an average of 70% of your operating expenditure comprised of labor (for not taking contractors into account) there is no bigger expense post to optimize if you want to drive better execution. It’s not a matter of what but rather who drives the execution of your strategy. To learn more about this exciting book visit this Return on Execution(c) link to read the short version of it.

You’ll see posts from the SF Research team as well as guest posts from our select thought leaders on the topic of driving execution. Keith will share insights from working with our customers around the world in how they increase their ability to execute both here and through Twitter so sign up for that too. We welcome your active input and feedback. Let’s go drive some better execution.

Which is more important?   It’s a bit of a chicken vs. egg argument, but it’s fair to say that both are critical to driving positive financial results.   Put it this way, if defining strategy explains 15% of a company’s financial performance then 85% must be explained by the execution of the strategy.  You can’t separate the two, but given those percentages it’s also fair to say that execution is  a much harder task. The more you study this the clearer the evidence becomes.

What do the greatest companies all have in common?  You got it — the ability to focus their organization on strategy execution by ensuring that each individual is working (i.e., executing) on goals that matter to the organization.  What type of goals “matter?”  Put simply, only the ones that have a direct line back to the Strategy sitting in a binder on the CEO’s bookshelf.

We’re just researching what impact we have on our customer’s ability to communicate strategy and execute new directions faster. The early results are very intriguing and positive – and we promise to share them when we finalize our research.   The timing is also significant as the economy has forced companies to be agile and demands that companies be able to shift their strategy (and subsequent execution) at a much more rapid pace than in a bull market.

The thing that struck me when doing some desktop research was that even though we know that 85% of performance is due to execution, the amount of content available is unbelievably skewed towards strategy — a simple web search on “Business Strategy” returns 3X more hits than “Business Execution”  (80M hits vs. 24M hits).   The term strategy execution returns only 3.5M hits.

The good news is that the “worm is turning.”   Execution is the topic du jour – maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s just the natural evolution of business.   Regardless, you can put us squarely on the “Business Execution” team, and we’re looking forward to sharing our results soon.

After all, Execution is the name of the game to drive financial results

(Eriks note – Written by Keith Messick, SuccessFactors Research)

I have a job that most people would find either very interesting or very boring.  I’ll let you decide which, but essentially my job is to help people quantify the financial benefits of Optimizing their Investment in their people.   Which people?  Their employees, human capital, talent, etc…   It’s a hot topic at the moment, and certainly the economy has increased the importance of making “smart” people decisions.

For the most part, your average company invests the vast majority of their dollars in people, process, and technology.    Out of those three, People are (typically) by far the average company’s biggest expense.  Research has actually shown that 70% of most company’s operating cost is People related.     So I’m here to talk about optimizing your people investment right?  Not exactly.   Today, I’m writing about the “other P” – Process.  Or to be more exact, your “People Processes.”  Confused yet?  Keep reading…

First of all, people and process are linked.  The definition of Process in a business context is “a method or system for achieving a commercial result.”   Put simply, it’s a method or system that your people execute on to drive commerce  – i.e., goods, services, cash, revenues, margin, etc…   If you have inefficient processes, then you’re hindering your company’s (People) ability to execute and drive commerce.    When I’m speaking with executives about the business impact of “Workforce Optimization” many of their eyes start to glaze over when I discuss the value to the organization of creating more efficient people processes for their Front-Line Managers and HR staff to execute on.     The CFO or COO will tell me that those are “soft” benefits and they aren’t interested.    Technically, they’re right – if a process improvement doesn’t allow you to reduce or re-allocate resources, then it is indeed a “soft” benefit.  However, the line between “soft” and “hard” benefits is blurry at best and I would argue that you can’t optimize the commercial result (hard benefit) without first optimizing the method or system (soft benefit).

The fact of the matter is that if we were talking about this in a manufacturing environment then the same COO and CFO would likely have less of a problem with the line between hard and soft.  If I was telling them that if they improve these inputs (process), then they would increase production by 100 widgets per hour (Output or Commercial Result), then they’d likely get our their checkbook and want to know how soon it can be implemented.    Unfortunately, many times people aren’t as willing to make the direct connection with their “People Processes.”    People are variable – some work harder than others, some are smarter, they have bad days, their favorite teams lose the Super Bowl,  their Mother-In-Law just moved in, and the kid gets sick – it’s certainly not as cut and dry as “Input In” and “Widgets Out.”     The problem is that they make up the most significant portion of your Operating Cost so not fully optimizing that investment is just simply Bad Business.    If you’re an executive reading this here are a few ways to determine how optimized your people investment really is:

· What % of your company can tell you the Organizations Strategic Goals?   Go to the Water Cooler and ask a few people.   Just for fun, also ask them when is the next company holiday – they’ll probably all know the answer to that question.

· Are you measuring top to bottom performance based on those Strategic Goals?   By the way, that may be hard to do if the people in your organization don’t know the goals (see question #1).

· Do you know who your top performers are across the entire organization?    Do you reward them differently for their contribution?

I could go on and on, but the answers to those three questions are a good litmus test for understanding whether your company’s largest investment is being managed wisely.    If it’s not, then you might want to consider investing in a better method to drive commercial result.

In parting, I like to point your attention to the “mother of all processes” – the US Tax Code.   Based on our earlier discussion, the Tax Code in and of itself is merely a process, so improving it would only yield “soft” benefits right?   Forbes Magazine has a blurb discussing the complexity of the process.    In 2008, 500 changes were made to the US Tax code.  The “process” changes to the tune of nearly 1000 words/day being added.    Nowhere is the blurry line between hard and soft benefits more apparent.  The process now consumes 7.6 Billion hours of American’s time per year – the equivalent to 3.6 million jobs.     What’s the result, output, or commercial result?    Well, three of the President’s cabinet appointees have had “tax compliance” issues due to the complexity of the method/system/process.   (By the way, it’s not a political blog, so I’m just giving the benefit of the doubt).  If you’re a business, then you employ teams of people just to navigate through the complexity.   If you’re a regular Joe Q. Public, then you spends hours of your own time and money in order to achieve the optimal commercial result.  Sound familiar?

Maybe process does matter after all…

Though being one of the best songs ever by Pink Floyd when Roger Waters was still with the band it should have little to do with how a business or for that sake the biggest administration in the world is run.

I don’t know if we should talk about a new world order but the current situation is unprecedented and our new President Obama is focused on changing how America is run to avoid a longer and deeper recession than necessary. Targeted spending in strategic areas married with a new modus operandi for how the business is run is his recipe. That is not a small task. What I think is most interesting about this whole new deal is not just the magnitude of spending that is being proposed but the measures on how to change how America is run.

Obama being quoted in USA today, “Our problem is not just a deficit of dollars. It’s a deficit of accountability, a deficit of trust,” Obama said at a brief news conference. “We can no longer afford to sustain the old ways when we know there are new and more efficient ways of getting the job done . . . Even in good times, Washington can’t afford to continue these bad practices. In bad times, it’s absolutely imperative that Washington stop them,” Obama said.

“So change and reform can’t just be election-year slogans. They must become fundamental principles of government . . . The appointment I am making today is one of my most important.”

Obama appointed the United States’ first Chief Performance Officer. That’s right a CPO. Nancy Killefer will work with the different cabinet departments to drive alignment and execution from all the people serving there. Yes government is people business. People not organizations perform.

Hiding is no recipe for changing and driving America no more. We can’t afford to be comfortably numb in this situation. We need leadership, accountability and action.

Is this appointment the start of a trend for other organizations? Will more organizations increase the focus on driving performance to thrive in these times? Will more organizations appoint CPO’s?

It is just great to see the American government start acting like a business focusing on driving performance. The worlds’ greatest companies all have a tremendous focus on aligned execution. The greatest companies have transparent systems where they can measure and thus manage the most strategic assets they have – the performance of their people. Full visibility requires real trustworthy data that these companies get from their talent management tools. Imagine the President having full visibility into how people are aligned on Americas goal with full transparency into what works and not all the way down to individuals performing or not…

Good luck Nancy Killefer!