Thirteen

Sarah let me know during our meeting that she’d asked Saket Sahni to introduce himself that afternoon. Saket is the consultant that had helped define and design Attenzi’s Balanced Scorecard, and he was coming in specifically to do some work with Michelle (CMO).

Only two things appear to ring Saket’s bell – business performance management and the movies. “What we’ve got here is failure to communicate – Cool Hand Luke, 1967”, is just one of the ways Saket refers to organizations without strategy maps and effective BPM. He’s also convinced that Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s USS Enterprise employs the Balanced Scorecard despite there being, unsurprisingly, no reference as such in the Star Trek corpus.

Now what would life be without such characters as Saket? The meeting was memorable.

Saket challenges business dogma. I didn’t find him prescriptive, unless his prescription entails leaving you with a dose of great questions:

In the current times, if we don’t know what the world will look like next month let alone two quarters down the line, why do we develop twelve-month tactical plans?

The ‘market’ is the name we give to individual human agents in the aggregate, so what do we want each of those humans to do exactly? Do current statistical analyses really capture market patterns?

“Aboard ship there’s a danger in having too much of anything for then one is bound to have too little of something else – Mutiny on the Bounty, 1962”; does the good ship Attenzi have the right balance?