Plenary & Keynote Addresses 

Plenary Addresses

Applying The Three Laws of Performance:

The Key to Breakthrough Implementation

Steve Zaffron, CEO, The Vanto Group & Co-author of the best-selling book
The Three Laws of Performance: Rewriting the Future of Your Organization and Your Life

Initiatives to implement new measurement and management systems are often met with people’s “resistance to change.” In fact, 73% of change efforts fail and 70% of new strategies fall short of expectations. Instead of battling people’s resistance to change—a fight few of us will ever win—what if we could reverse the direction of this energy, turning it into ownership and accountability for the success of the new initiative? In The Three Laws of Performance, Steve writes about how to transform any situation, and in the process, dramatically elevate the performance of people, groups, or an entire organization. Come hear how The Three Laws of Performance can support any enterprise wide initiative, such as producing accelerated breakthrough implementations with Six Sigma projects. The pathway to success is through new leadership conversations that engage and align people in seeing a new future for their organization, and for themselves.

Key Issues

• Creating a performance culture that creates ownership and accountability
• Introducing a new type of leadership that listens for the future of the organization
• Rewriting a future that’s already written

New Rules for Managing in Turbulent Times

David A.J. Axson, Co-founder and former COO, The Hackett Group
& Author, Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management

The unprecedented economic events of the last two years have cast a harsh light on many of the management practices organizations have relied upon for decades. If nothing else we know that the extraordinary is now ordinary, but what are the implications for our management practices? Managers are engaged in a daily battle to understand both current and likely future performance. At a time when uncertainty,
volatility and risk are at an all time high, learn how leading organizations are redefining their management practices to support more timely and confident decision making. David Axson will highlight the new business practices that will emerge from the crash and the tools and techniques you can apply on a daily basis to chart a successful course to better manage the opportunities and threats inherent in the marketplace.

Key Issues

• Setting your plan and forecast time horizon to your decision making needs
• Matching your desire for detail with your predictive ability
• Building a GPS system for your business
• Redefining the rules of incentive compensation

Keynote Addresses

Rethinking the Way We Measure and Drive Organizational Success

Dr. Dean Spitzer, Performance Measurement and Service Quality Thought leader, IBM Corporation & Author, Transforming Performance Measurement

What do you do when measurement is as important as the measurement data itself? Although organizations are doing more measuring than ever before and investing huge amounts in technical infrastructures around performance measurement, they lack a “social infrastructure” to use it well. In this presentation, Dr. Dean Spitzer, author of the breakthrough book Transforming Performance Measurement, will change the way you think about performance measurement. You will learn how to transform performance measurement from something negative, to a positive force in your organization through changing the “context of measurement.” Dr. Spitzer will explain what you must do to make your organization more intelligent by converting data into information, knowledge and wisdom. When you combine the right technical aspects of performance measurement with the right contextual ones, your organization’s measurement system will become truly
transformational.

Key Issues

• Transforming performance measurement into a positive force within your organization
• Converting performance measurement data into information, knowledge, and insight
• Assessing your organization’s ability to use performance measurement effectively
• Determining the opportunities for improving the “context of measurement” 

Improving Productivity Growth in Any Economy

Luiz Carvalho, CEO, Alexander Proudfoot Corporation

The 2008 Global Productivity Study conducted by the Alexander Proudfoot Corporation provided some interesting and surprising results. The report, which involved responses from over 1200 C-level executives worldwide, found that globally, employees spend over 34% of their time being unproductive. Although many of the established procedures for improved productivity have been around for decades, many executives still find their companies possess costly, non-value added activities as components in their work flows. In many instances, the full effect that these activities have on the bottom line isn’t known. In this session, Mr. Carvalho will explore the most common barriers to productivity, how to recognize and remove these barriers, and the necessary role of management in securing process improvement & buy-in to accomplish positive sustainable
change. Mr. Carvalho will also delve into ways that employee behavior modification can radically improve existing initiatives in your company.

Key Issues 

• Understanding barriers to productivity
• Role of management in improving productivity
• The impact of productivity on top line growth 

The Essentials in Assessing and Improving Performance

Jack Alexander, CEO, Jack Alexander and Associates LLC
& Author, Performance Dashboards and Analysis for Value Creation

In spite of a great deal of time, effort and money, many Corporate Performance Management (CPM) initiatives fail to gain traction and achieve full potential results. In addition, most initiatives in CPM enable visibility into all aspects of the business. Unfortunately this often leads to a focus on what is easy to measure rather than
a focus on what is most important to the organization’s long term success. In order to be fully relevant and achieve full potential results, we need to shift our perspective from tracking what is easy to measure, to measuring important business drivers and enablers. This CFO turned business consultant, author and lecturer offers some unique thoughts on developing and improving effective performance management systems.

Key Issues

• Focusing analytics on what’s important: value drivers, agility, innovation,execution, and human capital
• Linking value drivers to operating processes, activities, and measures
• Best practices in creating high impact dashboards and analytics for value creation

Avoiding Common Mistakes in Data Visualization

Naomi B. Robbins, Data Visualization Authority & Author, Creating More Effective Graphs

Good graphs are extremely powerful tools for communicating quantitative information clearly and accurately. Unfortunately, many of the ones we see today are poor and can confuse, mislead, or deceive the reader. This can occur because the designer is not familiar with principles of effective graphs or because the software used has a poor choice of default settings. We point out some of these graphical mistakes including using unnecessary dimensions, not making the data stand out, making mistakes with scales, showing changes in one dimension by area or volume, and not making your message clear. In most cases very simple changes make the resulting graphs easier for the reader to understand. In addition, we show some common mistakes with tables. Naomi ends the session with some useful little—known graph formats that communicate data
more clearly than the everyday graphs that are more commonly used.

Key Issues 

• Recognizing misleading, deceptive, and confusing graphs
• Tips for improving your graphs and tables and exposing newer, more effective graph forms
• Being more critical and analytical when viewing graphs