Grapes are a vines babies

A thought occurred to me yesterday while I was working with my operations team on a reasonably complex data issue. We were waiting for the results of a program to come back and I was nibbling at the grapes in the company fruit bowl. For those of you that don't have office based lives, the latest must have accessory is company provided fruit. Fresh fruit is delivered to the office every other day, and staff get to munch for free. It's a HR thing aimed at us all leading healthier lives. I'm all for it.

So I'm sitting there eating grapes, big fat juicy seedless grapes, the best sort. I felt a bit guilty that they'd come in from Kenya via Air freight, not so environmentally friendly, and I felt my carbon footprint flex ever so slightly.

I'm eating grapes and suddenly the thought occurs to me, that these grapes are the vines babies. Grapes are the equivalent of eggs surely. The plant-world equivalent of an unborn foetus.

I'm not a vegetarian. I eat meat and dairy, so really this shouldn't matter should it. Milk is not the innocent white-coloured water we pour over cereals, but the fluid used by a mother cow to feed baby calves. Eggs are unborn chicks.

If vegetarians don't eat meat and vegans don't eat meat or dairy. What do you call someone who doesn't eat meat, dairy or fruit and vegetables??

Answers on a postcard...

Corporate Performance Management

A healthy and stable business finds the balance between, often competing, stakeholders. A point I try and make in a humorous way in my previous post about my local Off-License. Corporate Performance Management is the new name for what was referred to as the 'balanced scorecard' approach to executive management. This approach aims to balance the competing stakeholders such as employees and shareholders, customers and suppliers.

Limited companies need to provide a good return for their shareholders to do that they need the best staff, who like to be paid well. The more you pay your staff, the less profit you have to distribute amongst your shareholders, or the more you need to charge your customers for goods in order to make the profit, or the harder deal you need to negotiate with suppliers in order to minimise costs, etc etc.... So we have many stakeholders who all have individual needs, which often compete against each other, but to create a sustainable business they all need to be managed well.

Corporate Performance Management, or CPM for short, is about setting upper and lower boundaries for each of these stakeholders and their interests and then monitoring the performance of each to keep within these boundaries. It's CPM that we can blame for staff survey's, who want to know if 'My contribution is recognized by my manager', 'I have an opportunity for career progression' and 'the pay I get for my job is fair'. It's also behind Retailer/Supplier code of ethics and for the rise in Corporate Social Responsibility.

Whilst mostly CPM is used at the executive level, the principal applies equally well within departments. Shops need to balance the wishes of the customer in not having to queue, with the impact on the retail wage budget in having excessive staff manning the checkouts. An area where retailers invest heavily to create the right balance, as discussed in an earlier post on queueing theory. Inventory levels are another key area where the balance between stock and availability needs to managed closely, to minimise the costs of out of stocks and the lost interest of having money tied up in stock instead of in the bank.Sustainable business isn't "all about the numbers", it's a balancing act.