The 5 P's of perfomrance management

We are all familiar with 5 P’s of marketing: People, Place, Product, Price, and Promotion. A useful checklist, but a blank canvass on which you can paint almost anything.

These urgent and recessionary times call for a tougher approach. Here are my five P’s of Performance Management (aka Getting Things Done):

• Plan: pay attention to what’s important, and set quantifiable performance standards.
• Practice: a plan is useless until it is implemented.
• Praise: yourself or others when your get the right results. People make the difference and need to understand what constitutes a job well done.
• Persistence: with thorough preparation and planning you can afford to persevere until you reap the rewards. Poor preparation and planning always sows doubt and uncertainty, and a tendency to bolt before your horse crosses the finish line.
• Patience: have none of it. Refine, polish, and generally improve your approach until it produces the goods. Patience is overrated and completely different to persistence.

As Thomas Edison apparently pointed out:

"Everything comes to him who hustles while he waits".

Or as Napolean Hill is credited with saying:

"Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable
combination for success."

A more succinct version of my less patient offering.

I came across super-tough advice for business leaders in an old management article. Punch-ups (competition isn’t pretty), Poaching (wisely), Protect (your position), cultivate Paranoia, Pride (in the business) and Pulverise (not dissimilar to my Persistence idea). I wonder if the author was an ex-boxer?