Editorial

Citation

Radnor, Z. and Heap, J. (2008), "Editorial", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 57 No. 7. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2008.07957gaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Volume 57, Issue 7

There has been one of those silly dialogues (or mulit-logues since it involved several letters) in the press recently about the inability of men with large necks to get shirts to fit. Manufacturers assume that men with large necks also have long arms... if you don’t, the shirt doesn’t fit. Amusing or not as you find such correspondence, it is good to be reminded that, on many occasions, one size does not fit all. The fact that you are outside of the “standard deviation” condemns you to ill-fitting clothes or shoes or.... We need to make use of averages, means and medians and so on.. but we do well to remember that in many sets of statistics, outliers are also important.

But all too often we measure our own performance relative to others; especially with regard to “trivial” factors such as how we look and how much we weigh. There are many programmes on TV showing how we can be “10 years younger”, telling us what we should (and should not eat) and how to stay fit. One of the editors, (we will let you guess which one!) has been aiming to lose some weight and raise their fitness level by entering a running race. This process has involved – and is still involving – a lot of measuring … weight loss (or gain!), time to complete a lap, the number of training sessions a week as well as reduction of inches/ centimeters. The purpose? To raise performance? But defined as what? And for whom? As we know if you look at a performance measurement regime, you should be able to judge the priorities of the organization. Does this work for individuals?

Talking about food, (were we?), the first academic paper by Kumar and Basu considers the Indian food industry. Their findings are interesting as they suggest that even though India is the third largest producer of food, this is not matched by their productivity due to a lack of technological investment. This paper comes at a time when there is worldwide concern about a “rice” shortage and the price of rice has risen by up to ten times of its “usual” price. In the paper Kumar and Basu give some suggestions by which productivity could be increased – including reducing the amount of food wastage in the process. Hopefully a few small changes could have a significant impact.

By the time you read this, hopefully the world’s stock markets will be into some form of, and degree of, recovery. We seem to be in constant slide at the moment. There are a number of reasons why but one of the catalysts was undoubtedly the “sub-prime” mortgage fiasco when banks lent money to many who had little hope of repaying. The banks – who we expect to be risk-averse – took extraordinary risks... and could in many cases be deemed to have been incompetent. After all, a bank that loses money has had to work hard to do so! Yet, do they pay. No – it is us, their customers … the ones who do pay our mortgages on time. It must be nice to be in a “win- win” situation whereby “I lose money, you pay it” is the rule of the day.

The next two academic papers are focused on banks and banking. Like the first paper they also use the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique in order to evaluate the relationship between various performance indicators. DEA is an approach originally developed within the USA which is used to measure the performance of units within a network. Within the network the units should be similar, have multiple inputs and outputs, and environmental factors which impact their performance. The efficiency of the units are calculated by weighted sum of outputs/weighted sum of inputs. The paper by Chen, Chen and Peng evaluates the performance of a bank by considering different set of indices. The paper considers if basic input/output items, Balance Scorecard, Balanced Scorecard with risk management and, traditional financial indices all give a similar result in reflecting the banks performance. By using a DEA based evaluation they conclude that the Balanced Scorecard gives a different assessment but they argue that this is due to the fact the BSC is more strategic and longer term in nature than the other approaches.

The final academic paper by Kumar and Gulati gives a ranking of India’s Public Sector Banks by taking a DEA approach to measure in particular their technical efficiency. In the paper they argue that Indian public sector banks waste around 11% of their inputs and in the paper Kumar and Gulati give some recommendations about how this efficiency could be increased. We wonder what the result would be if a similar approach was applied to the private banks both in India and in other countries around the world? Is 11 per cent good or bad??

The paper in the Reflective Practice section by Rickards opens up a debate on the merits ands usefulness of budgeting – a well-established process but one sometimes brought into question in terms of its usefulness. As with many other situations, it turns out to be “not what you do, but how you do it” that matters!

Many of the papers in IJPPM refer to situations in which there are multiple stakeholders. When assessing such a situation, it is often wise to ask “Who are the primary players?” Who is merely playing the game? … and who is setting the rules? This does not mean we ignore the issues of, and wishes of, “lesser” stakeholders … but if we don’t satisfy the “big guys”, we cannot satisfy these smaller fry.

Zoe Radnor, John Heap