Corporate Performance Management

Abstract

Two of the most important duties of a chief executive officer are (1) to formulate strategy and (2) to manage his company’s performance. In this article we examine the second of these tasks and discuss how corporate performance should be modeled and managed. We begin by considering the environment in which a company operates, which includes, besides outside stakeholders, the industry it belongs and the market it supplies, and then proceed to explain how the functioning of a company can be understood by an examination of its business, operational and performance management models. Next we describe the structure recommended by the authors for a corporate planning, control and evaluation system, the most important part of a corporate performance management system. The core component of the planning system is the corporate performance evaluation model, the structure of which is mapped into the planning system’s database, simulation models and budgeting tools’ structures, and also used to shape information contained in the system’s products, besides being the nucleus of the language used by the system’s agents to talk about corporate performance. The ontology of planning, the guiding principles of corporate planning and the history of 'MADE,' the corporate performance management system discussed in this article, are reviewed next, before we proceed to discuss in detail the structural components of the corporate planning and control system introduced before. We conclude the article by listing the main steps which should be followed when implementing a performance planning, control and evaluation system for a company.