Delivering Results: Managing What Matters

For any organization to perform and compete successfully, it must have the systems and processes in place to translate goals into achievable actions—and to measure and monitor results. Moreover, the organization must be able to adjust and adapt as market conditions, technologies, the competitive environment, government regulations, personnel, and other variables evolve, sometimes gradually and sometimes dramatically.

In Delivering Results: Measuring What Matters, Babson College professors and management consultants, Lawrence Carr and Alfred Nanni, show managers how to avoid the common pitfalls and mistakes when setting corporate strategy, and instead create a management system—unique to their organization—that aligns internal resources with objectives, motivates and rewards employees, and continuously provides feedback. Illustrating their concepts with numerous real-life examples (both successes and failures), practical tools and models, and a glossary of key terms, the authors demonstrate that knowing how to create and direct management systems that deliver results is, in itself, a strategic resource.

Lawrence P. Carr is Professor of Management Accounting at Babson College. He teaches in the Graduate School of Business and the School of Executive Education. His courses include Measuring and Achieving Strategic Results, Management Planning and Control, Strategic Cost Systems and Managing and Measuring Performance. He has served as the Dean of the Graduate School, Curriculum Coordinator for the first year MBA program, and has received the Kennedy Award and the Dean’s Award for teaching excellence. He is a management consultant and has published over thirty articles and fifteen teaching cases, and is a co-author of Total Quality Management: A Cross-Functional Perspective, Guide to Cost Management.

Prior to his academic career, Dr. Carr spent eighteen years in industry. For eight years he was a Division Controller and Vice President for Kollmorgen Corporation, a publicly held diversified electronics company. As President and CEO of OSRAM, Corp., the U.S. and Canadian subsidiary of OSRAM GmbH, part of Siemens, he developed and managed the dramatic growth (over 31% per year) of this lighting company for eight years. He led the corporation as it established distribution systems and centers, developed a manufacturing facility in the U.S., introduced new product lines to the market and executed two acquisitions.

Dr. Carr earned a BA in Psychology from Marist College, an MA in Industrial Administration, an MBA and a Ph.D. from Union College. His consulting clients include Fidelity, Heinz, Accenture, GE, IBM, Siemens, Pitney-Bowes, Xerox, and others. He has been published in Management Accounting, The Journal of Cost Management, Strategic Performance Measurement, International Journal of Strategic Cost Management and Sloan Management Review.

Alfred J. Nanni, Jr., is Professor of Management Accounting and Vander Wolk Chair in Management Accounting & Operational Performance at Babson College. His central research interest is performancemeasurement and strategy execution. He has written a wide variety of articles within this research domain for both academic and practitioner audiences. He is co-author, with J. Robb Dixon and Thomas E. Vollman, of The New Performance Challenge: Measuring Operations for World-Class Competition. Dr. Nanni has also consulted extensively on strategic cost and performance measurement with large manufacturing and service firms.

At Babson College, Professor Nanni has taught in the undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs. He was, until 1999, the original Director of the Intermediate Management Core Program, Babson's innovative multi-disciplinary, multi-year core business program for undergraduates. Prior to his arrival at Babson College, Dr. Nanni held positions at the Pennsylvania State University College of Business Administration, and Boston University School of Management. At Boston University, he was Chair of the Accounting Department as well as Director of the Accounting Doctoral Program. Professor Nanni earned a BA (cum laude) from Syracuse University and a M.S., B.A., Ph.D., from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.