Books Slideshow:
Make 8 Popular Performance Tools Work for You

Do you often find yourself wondering exactly why you're using performance tools because they're more trouble than they're worth? They may arrive with fanfare, but eventually you wind up feeling like a kid who ordered X-ray glasses from a comic book ad: duped. The book "Beyond Performance Management: Why, When, and How to Use 40 Tools and Best Practices for Superior Business Performance" (Harvard Business Review Press/available in February), reveals that 30 percent of performance and management tools fail to deliver what they promise. To avoid this, authors Jeremy Hope and Steve Player break down the typical flaws found within 40 of these initiatives, and then establish best practices to get the most out of your efforts. Some of those selected, such as CRM and BI, are of interest to CIOs. Others are traditional tools that have served a broad range of managers for decades. Hope, now deceased, was research director for the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a collaborative effort to promote shared learning/performance management research. Player is program director of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table North America and founder/management director of The Player Group, a planning, performance measurement and cost management consultancy. For more about the book, click here.