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This article describes and illustrates the practical application of a new measurement framework – The Performance Prism – which addresses the shortcomings of many of the traditional measurement frameworks being used by organisations today. The Performance Prism, with its comprehensive stakeholder orientation, encourages executives to consider the wants and needs of all the organisation’s stakeholders, rather than a subset, as well as the associated strategies, processes and capabilities. DHL’s board for the UK have used this framework to re‐engineer their corporate measurement and reporting system and the article explains DHL and other firms’ experiences with the Performance Prism.

The design and use of performance measurement systems has received considerable attention in recent years. Many organizations have redesigned their measurement systems to ensure that they reflect their current environment and strategies. But how to maintain them over time? Increasingly, the environment in which organizations compete is dynamic and rapidly changing, requiring constantly changing strategies and operations that reflect these changing circumstances. Despite this, few organizations appear to have the internal culture and systematic processes in place to manage their performance measurement systems in order to ensure that they continue to reflect their environment and strategies. This article presents case study research that investigates what actions organizations can take to ensure that their measurement systems change over time.

There is massive interest within the financial community in ways of improving and shortcutting the arduous process of planning and budgeting. Sponsored by Accenture, researchers at Cranfield School of Management’s Centre for Business Performance reviewed the literature and interviewed 15 leading companies to obtain insights into the best practices organizations are actually adopting. While some companies have simply exorcised the term budgeting from their corporate vocabularies, a group of pioneering Scandinavian companies have dispensed with budgeting altogether.

In an age of an ever‐increasing number of mergers and acquisitions, why do so many fail? Throughout the 1990s, and on into the 2000s the newspapers are full of reports of frenetic M&A activity. Yet horror stories highlighting failed mergers and acquisitions – AT&T, Quaker Oats, Disney, Sony, Compaq, General Electric (yes, even GE) – abound. It is almost as if the excitement of the deal consumes management’s passion. In the run up to the merger or acquisition, energy levels are intense. Yet, afterwards planning and post‐merger activities are weak and ineffective. There are of course numerous reasons why M&As fail – poor strategic concepts, personality problems at the top, cultural differences, poor employee morale, incompatible information systems, etc. The one explored in this article is post‐merger integration. Specifically, we ask how managers can track whether their post‐merger integration efforts are working.

The great chartered companies that spearheaded early modern European empire combined economic accumulation and the projection of sovereign power. They operated through networks of geographically dispersed imperial agents, experiencing bottlenecks in the long-distance flow of goods and enforcement and significant lags in communication with, and among, their agents. We develop an agent-based model, comparing an entrepot and networked structure of metropole and outpost relations. The model enables us to highlight the associated outcomes of a range of dyadic and triadic colonial networks exemplified by the Dutch East Indies Company and English East India Company, respectively. It captures basic network structure and the impact of temporal lags bound up with the policing of agents and delivery of goods over great distances. We conclude, first, that overall profits are higher for the triadic form, but as the colonial entrepot becomes a bottleneck, it accrues a disproportionate share of those profits. Second, we reveal the potential impact of the bottleneck on the evolving triadic form. The closer the entrepot is to the metropole, the better the outposts perform; however, the entrepot itself fares much worse, ultimately depressing profits at the system level. Time lags are shown to pose significant challenges for both competitiveness and control; they are a seedbed of colonial autonomy.

Much research has been done into capital planning approaches on both sides of the Atlantic over several decades, but it has tended to be one‐dimensional – focusing almost exclusively on the application of financial appraisal techniques. Meanwhile little has been done to examine either the efficacy of other elements of the process or executives’ satisfaction with the way the process works. Members of Cranfield School of Management’s Centre for Business Performance, sponsored by Accenture, set the record straight with both literature and practitioner research into the capital planning process that also presents a new framework and develops best practice principles.

With their most recent publications on the balanced scorecard, Kaplan and Norton have focused on the learning and growth perspective in an attempt to clarify its constituent parts, as they acknowledge that many organizations struggle with what to include in this perspective. For that reason Kaplan and Norton introduce the concept of intangible assets as the content of the learning and growth perspective. They classify intangible assets into human capital, information capital, and organization capital. However, it is believed that this latest attempt to evolve the balanced scorecard might have an adverse effect. This article outlines how Kaplan and Norton failed to acknowledge the large body of literature on intangible assets and, therefore, produced an inconsistent, incomplete, and potentially very confusing classification of intangible assets.

The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyse the power dynamics and vested interest groups that shape the lack of evidence discourse, which is critical of the way evidence is produced within and for the sport for development (SFD) field. This examination recognises that an understanding of the dominant neoliberal context within which SFD is located is critical.

Using a Foucauldian conceptual framework, power, knowledge and discourse relating to political actors in SFD – funders, policy makers, academics and sport development practitioners (SDPs) – are assessed. This paper addresses two key questions: How is the lack of evidence discourse constructed, and what is its impact? And whose interests are served in the interpretation, generation and reporting of evidence?

This paper concludes that although in a Foucauldian sense power surrounding evidence is everywhere, the neo liberal context, which situates SFD, favours the privileging of evidence discourses associated with and derived from funding organisations, political and academic interest groups to the detriment of evidence discourses associated with SDPs. Clearly then there is a major tension concerning knowledge transfer, power and process, and the way that evidence can be used to inform practice.

The paper attempts to highlight the power dynamics influencing the way evidence is produced within SFD and that much is needed to move the field forward in a more united approach for what counts as evidence for all political actors.

The chapter studies the current tendencies of the Russian practice of decision-making in business systems by the example of a gas distribution company of the Russian Federation. In the modern Russian practice, the companies transform the system of decision-making to the process-oriented approach, which envisages decision-making and correction of decisions not according to functional responsibilities but according to consecutively performed procedures of conducted business processes.

The authors describe the procedure of formation of business processes in a gas distribution company by the example of the business process “Technological connection” and provide its characteristics.

As a result of studying foreign approaches to formation of the model of management and decision-making in companies, the authors develop a methodology of evaluation of economic effectiveness of implementation of a business process, based on the principles of management according to goals and KPI. This methodology allows evaluating the obtained results of a separate stage and of the business process on the whole.

By the example of the studied business process, a set of key indicators of effectiveness of a separate subprocess “Formation of technical condition” in a company is offered, and calculations of final results of effectiveness of this business process are provided. As a result of the final evaluation, practical recommendations for development of managerial decisions in a company are provided.