Chapter 1 Performance Through Time

Overview

The biggest challenge facing business leaders is to understand and drive performance into the future while improving long-term profits. Executives in nonprofit organizations have performance aims too, though they may not be financial. To tackle this challenge, leaders need good answers to three basic questions: why the business’s performance is following its current path, where current policies and strategy will lead, and how the future can be altered for the better.

This chapter will do the following:

• clarify these questions and explain the contribution that a sound approach to strategy can make
• explain why performance through time is so critical
• outline some limitations of existing strategy tools that explain why few senior managers use them
• give you practical techniques for developing a time-based picture of the challenges you face