Hello and welcome back to the Deep Dive. I want
to start today with a specific feeling. I think
it's something every single person listening
has felt, whether they're running a multinational
corporation or, you know, just trying to manage
a household budget. It's that physical sensation
of rowing a boat. You are sweating. Your muscles
are burning. You are putting absolutely everything
you have into every single stroke. You're giving
it 110%. Exactly. And then you look up, wipe
the sweat off your forehead, and you realize
the boat is just spinning in a circle. Or, and
this is maybe even more terrifying, you realize
that while you're rowing north with all your
might, Everyone else in the boat is rowing southeast.
Yes, that's it. Exactly. It's that universal
frustration of effort without progress. It's
the disconnect between I am working so, so hard
and why on earth aren't we getting anywhere?
And today we are diving into a topic that, well,
it claims to be the solution to that specific
nightmare. We are talking about business performance
management. Which, I'll be the first to admit,
is a phrase that sounds like it was designed
by a committee to put insomniacs to sleep. It
really does. I have to be honest, when I saw
the research stack for this week, I saw business
performance management, and my brain immediately
went to, okay, get ready for an hour of spreadsheets,
acronyms, and people in suits pointing at pie
charts. Yeah, the corporate speak. I was ready
to be bored, but... And I really want the listener
to hear me on this. I was completely 100 percent
wrong. I'm glad to hear you say that, because
usually, you know, when people hear performance
management, their minds go straight to their
annual review. Oh, yeah. They think of some horrible
form they have to fill out where they rate themselves
a four out of five on synergy and just hope they
get a two percent raise. Right. The bureaucratic
hoop jumping. It feels like a chore. But as I
got into this research, especially the stuff
we're going to talk about later, the stuff about
the philosophy. performance, I realized this
isn't about bureaucracy at all. It's about it's
like the nervous system of an organization. Hmm.
That's a good way to put it. It's about psychology.
Honestly, at times it felt more like we were
reading a treatise on human nature than a business
manual. Well, that's because at its core, a business
is just people. It's just a collection of humans
trying to do something together. And if you don't
understand how to align human behavior with a
big abstract goal. you don't really have a business.
What do you have? You just have a group of people
in a room, you know, confusing each other. So
that is our mission today. We are going to strip
away the corporate speak, and believe me, there
is a lot of it, to figure out how organizations
actually measure success, why they almost always
fail at it, and the deep, almost existential
reasons why we all get stuck. And I think we
have to start with the alphabet soup. Oh, we
have to. It's like a prerequisite. Because the
business world seems to have a fetish for three
-letter acronyms. It's unavoidable. I think it's
a mechanism of gatekeeping, honestly. If you
confuse people with enough acronyms, they have
to hire you, the consultant, to explain them.
That is a very cynical take, and I absolutely
love it. So, okay, in the research, I'm seeing
BPM, I'm seeing CPM, and I'm seeing EPM. And
they seem to be used almost interchangeably.
Help us out here. Are these different beasts
or is this just branding? For all intents and
purposes, for the person listening to this, they
are the same beast wearing different hats. Okay.
BPM is business performance management. CPM is
corporate performance management. EPM is enterprise
performance management. It's all the same idea.
So why the different names then? Is it just,
like you said, consultants trying to sell a new
thing every few years? That's a huge part of
it, yes. But it also depends on who is doing
the talking. The source material points out that
the industry analysts, the people who write the
reports and the software vendors, they can't
even agree on a standard term. So Gardner might
call it one thing to differentiate their report
from, say, IDC, who calls it something else entirely.
But if you strip away the label, the function
is identical. And what is that function? If we
boil it down to its absolute essence, what is
it? Alignment. That is the one word you need
to remember from all of this. Alignment. It is
a set of processes and, yes, analytical tools
designed to ensure that the strategy actually
connects to the execution. Strategy connects
to execution. That sounds great on a PowerPoint
slide, but let's make it more visceral. You used
an analogy in our pre -show chat about the human
body that I thought was perfect for this. Right.
Think of an organization, any organization like
a human body. The brain is the strategy, the
C -suite. The brain says, I see a cup of coffee
over there. I want to drink it. That's the goal,
the mission statement. Exactly. We will be the
leading consumer of coffee in this room. I can
get behind that mission. Now, for that coffee
to actually reach your mouth, the brain has to
send a signal, right? It goes through the nervous
system, down the spine, to the arm, to the hand.
Okay. The hand has to extend. It has to grasp
the cup with just the right amount of pressure,
not too loose so you drop it, not too tight so
you crush it, then lift it and bring it to the
mouth. And BPM is the nervous system in this
analogy. BPM is the nervous system. If you have
some kind of neurological disorder, the brain
might be screaming, pick up the cup. But the
hand might just spasm. Or the hand might not
move at all. Or, and we've all seen this in companies,
the hand might just punch the cup right off the
table. I feel like I have worked for several
companies where the hand is definitely, definitely
punching the cup off the table on a daily basis.
We all have. And that's the thing. Most companies
have a perfectly fine brain. They have a strategy.
They know what they want to do. We want to increase
sales. We want to have happy customers. It's
not rocket science. Right. The goals are usually
pretty clear. The problem is the nervous system
is shot. The signal isn't getting to the hand.
The hand, which is the employee sitting at their
desk on a Tuesday morning, doesn't know what
the brain wants. Or, and this is key, they are
incentivized to do something else entirely. So
BPM isn't just about checking the numbers at
the end of the quarter. It's the actual wiring
that connects the intention to the action. Precisely.
And the source material highlights that this
isn't a passive thing. It's very active. It involves
setting standards. That's telling the hand this
is what grasping the cup looks like. It involves
timely feedback. That's telling the hand, hey,
you're missing a bit to the left. And the rewards,
I assume. And it involves rewards, giving the
hand a little dopamine hit when it finally gets
the coffee. That clarity is what really struck
me. The text says it explicitly outlines the
role of each individual. But let's be real for
a second. In my experience, and I bet in the
experience of a lot of our listeners, that explicit
outline usually feels like a cage. It feels like
micromanagement. So how would you distinguish
between good, healthy alignment and just standing
over someone's shoulder breathing heavily? That
is the million -dollar question, isn't it? And
it's where most, and I mean most, implementations
of this stuff fail completely. Because if BPM
is just about compliance, just checking boxes
to say you did the thing, it's worthless. It's
actually worse than worthless. It's destructive
to morale. True BPM is about clarity of expectation,
not micromanagement of method. Okay, give me
an example. What's the difference? Micromanagement
is, I want you to make exactly 50 cold calls
using this exact script between 9 a .m. and 11
a .m., and you must log them in this specific
color -coded spreadsheet. Ugh. That's soul crushing.
That's treating the human like a robot. Exactly.
It's focusing on the activity. Now, alignment,
good alignment is. Our big goal is to increase
market share in this region by 10 percent. Your
role in that big picture is to generate new.
qualified leads how you do that is largely up
to your skill and creativity but we will measure
the outcome the number of qualified leads and
we'll give you feedback on whether you're on
track to help us hit that target ah okay so one
focuses on the motion the other focuses on the
result and crucially the connection to the big
picture exactly but and here is the big pivot
the thing that really surprised me even if you
have clear goals and even if you have a good
feedback loop things still go wrong All of the
time. And this is where the research took a turn
that I honestly did not expect. Yes. This was
my favorite part of the source material. I was
turning the page expecting to see a breakdown
of, I don't know, EBITDA or some other financial
metric. And suddenly I'm reading about ontology
and worldviews. It felt like we stumbled out
of the business school and into a philosophy
lecture. We did. We absolutely did. We stumbled
into the work of Werner Erhard, Michael C. Jensen.
And their colleagues. And I think this is the
most critical part of our entire deep dive today.
Because they argue that the standard way we look
at performance, that mechanical cause and effect
model, is fundamentally flawed. Flawed is a polite
way of putting it. They basically say we are
all looking at the world through a keyhole and
completely missing the entire door. That's a
perfect way to describe it. So let's break this
down. Usually, if performance is bad, if sales
are down, what's the first thing we do? We look
for a mechanical cause, a linear cause. We say,
oh, the price must be too high, or the sync people
are lazy, or our marketing slogan wasn't catchy
enough. It's very simple. A causes B. But Eckhart
and Jensen say there is a hidden source of performance
that this kind of analysis can't even touch.
They call it ontological constraints. Now, ontology
is a big $10 word. Can we unpack that for a minute?
We have to. Ontology is the philosophical study
of the nature of being, of reality, what is real.
So what Eckhart and Jensen are saying is that
a person's worldview. The filter, the lens through
which they see reality itself, acts as a constraint,
like a governor on an engine, on what is even
possible for them to do. Okay, that sounds really
deep, but I need to ground this. Because right
now it sounds like we need to start burning sage
in the conference room to improve quarterly numbers.
How does a worldview actually stop someone from
doing their job? All right, let's construct a
scenario. Let's say you have a mid -level manager
named Steve. Steve is smart. He's capable. He
knows the product inside and out. He knows the
customers. Yeah. But his team's performance is
just stagnant, flat. Okay. So the mechanical
A causes B analysis would be send Steve to a
management training seminar. Right. Or give Steve
a better laptop. Yeah. Maybe increase Steve's
bonus if he hits his targets. We'll incentivize
him. We'll incentivize him. And you do all of
that and Steve's performance doesn't budge, not
one inch. Why? Because Steve has a worldview
constraint. What's his worldview? Let's say deep
down, based on his past 20 years of experience
in corporate America, Steve holds a worldview
that says this. Upper management is predatory.
They don't actually care about the product or
the customers. They only care about juicing the
stock price to get their own bonuses. I think
I know Steve. I think I am Steve on some days.
Many of us are. But look at the practical consequence
of that worldview. If that is Steve's fundamental
reality, how does he interpret a new strategic
initiative from the top? He immediately sees
it as a scam or a trap or just the flavor of
the month. Exactly. So if his boss comes into
the room all excited and says, we have this amazing
new opportunity to expand into a new market.
What does Steve hear? He hears, here comes another
half -baked scheme to squeeze more work out of
us for the same pay so the CEO can buy a new
boat. Right. And so what does he do? He disengages.
He does more than that, doesn't he? He doesn't
just disengage. He... actively though maybe subconsciously
resists it. He complies maliciously. He does
the absolute bare minimum required to not get
fired. His performance is capped. Not because
he lacks the skill, but because his worldview
makes high performance literally impossible.
You can't perform excellently in a system you
believe is fundamentally corrupt or pointless.
You can't. Your brain won't let you. It's a protective
mechanism. Yeah. And that is so powerful because
it means all the standard operating procedures
and key performance indicators in the world don't
matter a single bit if you haven't addressed
the lens the person is looking through. Wow.
Okay. And this leads directly to their second
major point, which is about language. But not
just the words we say out loud. They focus on
the unsaid. The unsaid. This part of the research
gave me chills reading it because it's just so
true. It's the conversation that happens with
your eyes across the conference table. It's the
meaning of the silence in the room after someone
says something. It's the elephant in the room
that everyone is quietly feeding peanuts to,
but nobody will acknowledge is there. Yeah. Paint
me a picture of the unsaid in action in a business
setting. Okay. Imagine a big project launch meeting.
The vice president is up at the front presenting
a timeline that is obviously patently impossible.
We are going to launch this fully integrated
global platform in three months. Right. Everyone
in that room is an expert. They are senior engineers,
project managers. They all know logically and
with certainty that this kind of project. takes
six months minimum. But nobody says it. Nobody
says a word. Maybe because they're afraid of
the VP. Maybe because the last guy who spoke
up and pointed out reality got sidelined. So
what do they do? They all nod. They say things
like, yes, an exciting challenge. But the unsaid
conversation is screaming in everyone's head.
It's screaming. And that unsaid conversation
is, this is going to fail. We are all going to
miss this deadline. This is a death march. And
we're all just pretending it isn't. And that
unsaid conversation becomes the actual reality
they are operating in, not the one on the PowerPoint
slide. That's the critical insight. Correct.
Yeah. And because their actual reality is this
is a death march. How do they perform? They don't
innovate. They don't take risks. They cover their
asses. They document every single email so they
can't be blamed when the whole thing inevitably
explodes. So the unsaid drags the performance
of the entire team down like a lead anchor. Yes.
And so if you apply the Earhart and Jensen approach.
A good manager isn't someone who just makes a
better timeline on a spreadsheet. A good manager
is someone who can make the unsaid said. How
do you do that? It's a manager who has the courage
to stop the meeting and say, hang on a second,
I'm sensing some hesitation here. The energy
in the room just dropped when I said three months.
What is the conversation you guys are all having
in your heads right now that you're not saying
out loud? That takes an incredible amount of
guts. And trust. It does. But that's what real
performance management is at a philosophical
level. It's not about forms. It's about clearing
the interference, the ontological constraints
and the unsaid toxins so that the nervous system
can actually work properly. I love that. It takes
it from this world of cold, hard mechanics to
something more like therapeutics. It's about
organizational health. It is. But we have to
zoom out a little because while this absolutely
applies to Stab and his cubicle, the source material
made a very clear point to show that this isn't
just for corporate offices and skyscrapers. No,
and that's a common misconception. We hear business
performance and we immediately think selling
widgets for a profit. But the principles of alignment
and worldview apply anywhere human beings are
trying to achieve a common goal. The source brought
up two really interesting examples that felt
at first like they were from left field, health
care and agriculture. Right. Let's start with
agriculture, specifically the research institutes
in developing sectors, because that felt like
such a hard pivot from talking about ontology.
It seems like a pivot on the surface, but it's
actually the exact same problem of alignment,
just in a much more complex environment. Think
about an agricultural research institute. What
is their product? What is their goal? Better
seeds. Research papers. It's fuzzy. It's incredibly
messy, right? If you are a sales company, your
primary metric is profit. It's easy. It's a number.
But if you are a research institute funded by
the government to improve food security in a
region, your metrics are, well, they're incredibly
complex. The source used the phrase societal
contribution. How on earth do you put societal
contribution into a spreadsheet and track it
weekly? You can't. Not directly. And that's the
challenge. Let's say your institute develops
a new strain of rice that is more resistant to
drought. Great. You can measure the scientific
output. We publish five peer -reviewed papers.
That's the academic metric. You can measure commercialization.
We sold $1 million worth of seeds to distributors.
That's the financial metric. But the real goal,
the mission, is did fewer people starve? Or did
local farmers' incomes... stabilize over the
long term. And those are lagging indicators.
Those results might not show up for five or even
10 years. Exactly. So how do you manage the performance
of a scientist today for a result that only happens
in a decade? The source talks about the need
for complex drivers. You can't just look at the
final outcome. You have to look at leading indicators.
Like what? Like collaborations. Are the scientists
in the lab actually talking to the farmers in
the field? Are they working with the local supply
chain distributors? Are they building a system?
Or are they just publishing papers in a vacuum?
It also mentions something called a smart lab
bubble, which sounds like a title for a sci -fi
movie. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. But it's really
about the modernization of these institutes.
In a so -called smart lab bubble, you are using
data -driven, real -time systems. It's not just
a guy with a clipboard and a notebook walking
through a field anymore. It's connected sensors
in the soil measuring moisture. It's real -time
genomic data from the plants. It's predictive
modeling for weather patterns. It's about getting
faster feedback from the system. So even in the
dirt, literally in the field, BPM is there. It's
just using different sensors and a different
timeline. That's it. Exactly. And then you have
health care. Yeah. And the stakes there are obviously
even higher. If a salesperson fails to meet their
quota, the company loses a bit of money. If a
hospital's performance management system fails,
people die. The alignment there has to be absolute.
There's no room for error. And yet it's one of
the hardest places to implement it correctly.
Because of the tension between the individual
and the system. A surgeon, for instance, might
be performing perfectly. The surgery itself was
a technical success. But if the post -op nursing
care is understaffed because of budget cuts and
the patient gets a preventable infection and
dies, was the outcome a success or a failure?
It was a failure of the system. It was a failure
of the system. Yeah. And that brings us right
to the team dynamic. Because whether it's a surgical
team in a hospital or a sales team on a floor,
you are rarely, if ever, working alone. And the
research had a very specific and stark warning
about what it called the teamwork paradox. The
paradox is this. You want the team to win. That's
the goal. But most performance management systems
that we see in the wild are designed to judge
and rank the individual. We've all seen this.
The most famous or infamous example is stack
ranking or the vitality curve. Yeah, that was
Jack Welch at GE, right? He made it famous. The
rank and yank. The idea is you rank all your
employees on a curve from one to 100. The top
20 percent get a big bonus. The middle 70 percent
are fine and the bottom 10 percent get fired
every year. And on paper, you know, to a certain
type of cold hearted, rational economist, that
makes a kind of brutal sense. Survival of the
fittest. You cull the weak members of the herd
and the herd gets stronger. But human beings
aren't wildebeest. We are complex social creatures
driven by emotion and psychology. If you tell
me that my survival, my ability to pay my mortgage,
depends on being ranked higher than you, what
is the first thing I am going to do? You're going
to stop helping me immediately. Worse than that,
you might actively sabotage me. Right. If I figure
out a better, more efficient way to do my job,
am I going to share it with you and the rest
of the team? Absolutely not. That's your secret
weapon. Of course not. Because if I share it,
you might get better, the whole team might get
better, and then you might knock me down into
that bottom 10%. So the system that was designed
to improve overall performance actually caps
performance because it destroys the flow of information
and collaboration. It creates a new ontological
constraint of fear and distrust. The source material
is very, very clear on this point. Effective
BPM must foster teamwork, cooperation, and trust.
If your metrics turn your office into the Hunger
Games, you have already lost. The game is over.
So how do we do it right? If we can't just fire
the bottom 10%, how do we actually measure things
and improve performance? The source gets into
the OD perspective. That's organizational development.
Right. And OD gives us a formula that is, on
the surface, deceptively simple. Performance
equals actual results versus desired results.
Okay. Simple enough. Actual versus desired. The
gap, the space between those two things, is what
they call the performance improvement zone. I
like that branding. It sounds a lot better and
more optimistic than calling it the failure gap.
It is. It implies a growth mindset. It implies
that the gap isn't a moral feeling. It's an opportunity.
It's closable. And the Office of Personnel Management,
the OPM, lays out a five -step cycle to work
within that zone. and close that gap and i want
to walk through these because in my experience
most companies only do two of them and they do
them poorly okay hit me what's step one step
one plan plan the work and set expectations okay
already we have a problem because in my experience
planning is usually just someone handing you
a quota and saying here's your number good luck
that's not a plan that's a wish a hope real planning
means setting expectations that are verified
and mutually understood Does the employee actually
understand how their work contributes to the
goal? Do they have the resources they need? Is
the goal even realistic? That's planning. Okay,
that makes sense. What's step two? Monitor. And
this doesn't mean spying on your employees with
keystroke loggers. It means looking at the data
continuously so you can make intelligent course
corrections along the way, not just at the end
of the year. Step three. Develop. This is the
one that gets skipped the most. Almost always.
Explain what you mean by develop. Okay, so you've
planned. And you're monitoring. You see a gap
opening up. You see Steve is falling behind on
his target. The default corporate reaction is
to put Steve on a performance improvement plan,
which is just code for we're about to fire you.
Right. It's a punitive step. It is. The develop
step says your first job isn't to yell at Steve.
It's to develop Steve. It's to sit down with
him and say, hey, I see a gap here. Let's figure
this out together. Do you need more training?
Do you need a mentor? Is there a bureaucratic
blockage that I, as your manager, can remove
for you? It's taking shared responsibility for
the employee's capacity. That requires a manager
who actually wants to manage and lead people,
not just someone who is good at filling out spreadsheets.
That is the whole ballgame, correct. After that,
step four is rate the actual formal evaluation.
And step five is reward. Now, on the reward side
and the rate side, we need metrics. We need something
to measure, and the source takes a really useful
study by Richard and his colleagues that outlines
three key pillars of organizational performance.
I found this helpful because usually we tend
to focus on just one of them. Yes, the three
pillars. They are financial performance, product
market performance, and shareholder return. Okay,
let's break this down. Financial performance
is the obvious one. Profit, return on investment,
that kind of thing. Right. Simple question. Did
we make money? Product market performance is...
What exactly? That's your sales growth and your
market share. Did we get bigger? Did we take
ground from the competitor? And finally, shareholder
return. That's things like total shareholder
return, economic value added. Basically, did
the stock go up? Do we create value for the owners?
So here's my question. Why do we need to separate
these three? Aren't they all kind of the same
thing? If I make a ton of money, doesn't my stock
go up and my market share naturally grow? Not
necessarily. And this is where bad BPM, a bad
incentive structure, can absolutely destroy a
company from the inside out. Imagine you are
a CEO and your annual bonus is tied only to pillar
number one, financial performance, specifically
this year's profit margin. Okay. My only job
is to maximize profit right now. How do you do
that? What are the easiest levers to pull? I
cut costs to the bone. I fire the entire research
and development department. I switch to cheaper,
lower quality materials for our product. I stop
all advertising and marketing spend. Boom. Your
costs plummet. Your revenue stays the same for
a few months out of inertia. Your profit margin
looks absolutely amazing. You get a massive bonus.
You're on the cover of a magazine. But what happens
to the other two pillars? My product market performance
is about to fall off a cliff because my product
now sucks and nobody knows about it anyway. Right.
And eventually my shareholder return is going
to crash and burn because Wall Street realizes
the company has no future and no innovation in
the pipeline. Exactly. You robbed Peter to pay
Paul. Wow. You sacrificed the long term for the
short term. A robust performance management system
forces you to balance these three pillars. It
creates a healthy tension. It forces the leadership
to say, yes, we want to be profitable, but T,
not at the expense of our future market share.
It's a three -legged stool. If you kick out one
of the legs, the whole thing falls over. That's
a perfect analogy. And that leads us directly
into the dark side. We've talked a lot about
how this should work in a perfect world. But
the research is also full of cautionary tales
about how it fails in the real world. And the
single biggest failure point, the one that comes
up again and again, is something we touched on
earlier. Fairness. The fairness factor. Humans
have an innate, primal, almost biological sense
of fairness. You see it in toddlers sharing toys.
You even see it in monkeys. There's a famous
experiment where if a monkey sees another monkey
get a delicious grape for doing nothing, well,
he gets a boring rock for doing a trick. He won't
just be sad. He will get angry. He will throw
the rock at the researcher. I have definitely
wanted to throw rocks at researchers or, you
know, bosses in the past. We all have. If employees
perceive this system as fun— If they think the
metrics are rigged, the boss just plays favorites,
the goals are impossible anyway, they don't just
perform poorly. They become actively disengaged.
They become toxic. They try to break the system.
And another trap that the source mentioned was
the compliance trap. This is when BPM devolves
into pure bureaucracy. It becomes a ritual devoid
of meaning. I have to fill out these stupid forms
by Friday so HR doesn't send me an angry email.
I feel like 90 % of corporate performance reviews
in America today are exactly that. It's a ritual.
There's no real conversation. There's no development.
It is. And the moment it becomes a ritual, it
loses all of its power. The alignment is completely
broken because the goal shifts from how do we
improve performance to how do we complete this
form as quickly as possible. The source also
mentioned 360 -degree feedback as being a kind
of double -edged sword. It is. It's a great example
of a tool that could be incredibly powerful or
incredibly destructive, depending on the environment
you use it in. So the idea is good, right? Getting
feedback not just from your boss, but from your
peers and the people who report to you, it gives
a full 360 -degree picture. Theoretically, it's
fantastic. But in practice, if you have a low
-trust culture, a political culture, it just
becomes another weapon. I'm going to trash you
in your 360 review because you didn't agree with
my idea in that meeting last week. Or the opposite.
I'll scratch your back if you scratch mine. It
becomes a popularity contest or a tool for political
maneuvering. Again, all comes back to the underlying
culture. You cannot install a fancy 360 feedback
software system on top of a toxic, low -trust
culture and expect it to magically fix the culture.
The culture will just corrupt the system. The
culture will always eat the system for breakfast.
Every time. This brings us to the final major
misconception. And it's a big one. The technology
myth. Because when I hear BPM or CPM, my mind
immediately pictures software. I picture a dashboard
on a giant screen in a boardroom with red and
green and yellow lights. And the software vendors
of the world love that you picture that. They
spend billions and billions of dollars on marketing
to make you believe that BPM is the software.
That if you just buy their product, all your
problems will be solved. But the source says...
What? The source says explicitly, software is
not essential to the definition of business performance
management. That is wild to me. It seems so counterintuitive
in our tech -obsessed world. I know. But it's
true. You can do world -class effective business
performance management with a napkin and a good
conversation. If you and I sit down and I clearly
explain the goal. and we agree on your role in
achieving it, and I give you honest, timely feedback,
and we trust each other, that is world -class
BPM right there. And the fancy software is just
a tool to help scale that conversation. Ideally,
yes. In the best case, it's a tool to facilitate
that. But what often happens is the software
becomes a distraction. We obsess over the dashboard,
and we forget to have the human conversation.
We confuse the map for the territory. There's
an interesting historical note in there about
Gartner, you know, the big tech analyst firm,
and how they changed the definition of all this
back in 2017. Yes. They actually stopped using
the term CPM, corporate performance management,
as a formal category. They blew it up and split
it into two new things, financial planning and
analysis, or FP &A, and financial close. Why
does that matter? It sounds like they're just
splitting hairs moving the deck chairs around.
It matters because it signals a fundamental shift
in thinking. It separates the looking forward
from the looking backward. Okay. Explain that.
Financial close is accounting. It's closing the
books at the end of the quarter. It's making
sure everything balances. It's history. It's
reporting on what happened. Like FP &A. FP &A
is planning. It's strategy. It's forecasting.
It's the future. Ah. So they recognize that you
can't drive the car if you're only looking in
the rearview mirror. That's it. Exactly. The
whole industry shifted its focus toward planning
and agility. So, wow. We've been on a massive
journey here. We started with that feeling of
frustration, of rowing in circles. We waded through
the alphabet soup of BPM, CPM, EPM. We got unexpectedly
deep into the philosophy of artological constraints
and the power of the unsaid. We looked at rice
farmers and heart surgeons. We analyzed the total
failure of the Hunger Games office culture. And
we stripped away the myth that this is all just
about software. That's a lot to take in. It is
a lot. But I want to bring it back to the listener
for a final takeaway. If I'm listening to this
and I'm a manager or maybe just an employee who
feels stuck and disengaged, after everything
we've talked about, what is the one thing I should
do differently tomorrow morning? I would say
this. Stop looking for a mechanical fix. Stop
thinking, if I just had a better spreadsheet
or a new project management app, everything would
be okay. Look at the clarity and the psychology
of the situation instead. Ask the hard questions.
Ask the really hard questions. Ask, do we as
a team actually agree on what winning looks like?
And more importantly, if you feel stuck, look
for the constraint. The worldview constraint.
Yes. If your performance is capped, don't just
ask, what am I doing wrong? Ask, how am I viewing
this situation? What is the story I'm telling
myself about this job, this company, or my boss
that is making success impossible? That brings
me to the final thought I want to leave everyone
with today. And it goes right back to Earhart
and Jensen and their most powerful idea. They
talk about the power of the unsaid. Here's where
it gets really interesting for some self -reflection.
We all have them. We all have these conversations
running constantly in our heads that we never,
ever speak out loud. I'm not good enough for
this role. My boss secretly hates me. This entire
project is doomed to fail. And whether you're
aware of it or not. Those unsaid conversations
are running your life. So the provocative thought
for the day is this. What is the unsaid conversation
that is currently putting a ceiling on your potential?
What is the one thing you aren't saying to your
boss, to your partner, or maybe most importantly
to yourself that is keeping your boat spinning
in circles? Identify that, have the courage to
speak it, and you might just find that the nervous
system starts working again. Thanks for diving
deep with us. We'll see you next time.