Monday, April 20, 2009
Where all the companies are above average
From a McKinsey survey of global executives:
More than half of all respondents—57 percent—say that because of good management, their companies have been less hurt than most by the crisis.
I love that.
3 Comments:
By 
Georg Felis, at
Mon Apr 20, 01:32:00 PM:
In all probability, in a growing economy, a *vast* number of global executives would claim their companies were performing above average (with the remainder claiming "average"). Now a days, this tends to sound like "Yes, we're doing great. Yes, we're doing great. We're bankrupt."
By Diane Wilson, at
Mon Apr 20, 02:51:00 PM:
The "Lake Wobegon Effect" has been known for years, especially in the area of CEO salaries. After all, what self-respecting company is going to announce to the world, "We hired a below-average CEO, so we could pass the savings along to our customers." No way.
By 
, at
Mon Apr 20, 06:30:00 PM:
Wonder if there's bonus money riding on those assessments?
At an IBM management training thing I attended, I had the pleasure of breakfast with "Lou" just before his presentation to the students. In one part of his discussion, he described how he took the helm of IBM, which was then in severe distress. They did a survey of customer service, and found that all the clients thought them well above average, even exemplary. There was confusion around how we could be doing so well by our clients yet so poorly financially ... later he learned that those who were executing the surveys (the salesguys) figured their clients were too busy, so they were filling them in "on their behalf".
The bottom line is the bottom line. Either you're making money, or you're f*cking up.
