Eliminate 20^th Century Problems through 21^st Century Management

The 20^th Century enterprise cannot manage the solution to specific business problems

The common definition of enterprise business is “the activity of providing goods and services”. In order to organize and manage the business, the enterprise must organize and manage the activity, through the performance solutions utilized, to provide goods and services, through the results of the activity. The conventional 20^th century enterprise faces many unsolvable problems, because performance solutions utilized in business activity, and business goods and services results provided and are not specifically defined and managed. Since the performance solutions with the problems and the results with the symptoms of the problem are not specifically identified and managed, general symptoms of business problems tend to be worked around using accumulated experience or trial and error, rather than solving the precise problem.

Result-performance Management separates results from performance for 21^st Century Management

The unsolvable problems can be eliminated only by separately organizing and managing business activity as performance, and goods and services provided as results. Then the enterprise will have the capability to identify and solve specific business problems. This enables 21^st Century Management, through Result-performance Management (R-pM). R-pM separately organizes, plans, operates, develops, and reports the results produced and the performance utilized. Result-performance Management provides one integrated method to organize and manage the business for the 21^st century and leave unsolvable 20^th century problem behind.

The 20^th century enterprise has always faced unsolvable problems

We all have experience with unsolvable performance problems that the 20th century enterprise has had to work around, such as:

• Periodic reorganization and upheavals, because the business is not organized
• Faulty investment analysis because benefits cannot be itemized
• Un-beneficial capital development, because unknown benefits are not managed to gain the return
• Unmanaged capital, intangible assets, unknown costs, unknown value, distorted capital worth arising from the focus on cash and accruals
• Performance management methods that do not manage performance, because performance is not properly defined
• Contrived value management because the creation of value is not understood and managed
• Misleading cost management because many costs are not known and costs are charged to the wrong things
• Inaccurate and incomplete financial recording because recording is dictated by principles and does not record business reality
• Corporate governance based on distorted financial reports rather than accurate management of strategic value
• Misaligned strategies, processes, systems, outsourcing, assets, etc. because there is nothing to align with
• Quality focused on final products because of hard-to-define performance quality
• Barriers to collaboration due to lack of means to determine shared costs and values
• Re-engineered business processes that hamper capital, quality, and cost management and prevent creation of value chains
• Business complexity due to various overlaid structures that do not fit together as one whole and obscure the view of the business
• Auditing to ensure that rules are followed, and no one looking at how resources are utilized to reach objectives
• Insufficient information because information abounds, but is not managed as capital to provide benefit
• Unmanaged capital because high-worth information, intellectual, and management capital is labeled as intangible rather than being managed to understand its worth as part of enterprise worth and its costs as part of enterprise costs

These problems remain despite new structures and books that purport to be the solution.

20^th century problems, caused by overlays on the business, can never be solved by more overlays

These unsolvable problems arise because the 20^th century enterprise organizes people, positions, units, functions and other contrived entities rather than the business. The organization structure is an overlay that the business must adjust to as the business changes over time. The 20^th century enterprise is managed by additional structures overlaid on the organization for strategic planning, processes, accounting, performance reporting, etc. Each overlay structure has its own contrived entities: such as center, activity, task, object, account, process, perspective, etc. that do not describe the business. The conventional experts try to solve the unsolvable problems by overlaying new contrived structures, improving the existing structures, or writing management improvement books. The problems are unsolvable, because they cannot be solved by adding new overlays or improving existing structures.

The challenge all 20^th century corporations face is to organize and manage their business to compete in the 21^st century

So, again, challenge for an enterprise is to organize and manage its own business in terms of the results produced and the tangible and intangible capital utilized as specific performance solutions to produce specific results. This produces one result-performance structure to organize and manage the business. No other structures are overlaid on the business. Once the enterprise has defined its own business, it is easy to implement and utilize R-pM for 21^st Century Management, to leave 20^th century problems behind.

Visit Result-performance-Management.com to learn more about organizing your business with R-pM for 21^st Century Management, and the R-pM Toolkit, your 21^st Century Management Manual.