Product Description

This book offers a new set of metrics for identifying, analyzing, and responding to the right information at the right time—helping companies to avoid disasters and seize opportunities

Based on exclusive research into recent business catastrophes—and drawing parallels to a range of nonbusiness disasters from 9/11 to the Challenger disaster—Heads Up outlines a four-step approach managers can use to identify which pieces of information merit real-time delivery, and as importantly, which do not.

McGee then provides a practical methodology—real time opportunity detection—for monitoring, analyzing, and responding to that critical information in time to ward off negative surprises and jump on potential opportunities ahead of competitors.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #708378 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-06
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.06" h x 6.36" w x 9.46" l, 1.20 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

From Publishers Weekly
These days it seems like a company’s problems don’t surface until the CEO is led away in handcuffs. But according to this illuminating primer on the fashionable Real-Time Enterprise management model, "surprises" like parts shortages, earnings disappointments, business downturns and, yes, indictments are always preceded by ample warning signs. McGee, a vice-president with the consultant group Gartner, Inc., insists that with the right information technology and methods, companies can monitor in real time the crucial five percent of business data that will give them insight into both trouble spots and unrealized opportunities. Writing in stolid but readable prose supplemented with a plethora of charts, he presents a reasonably coherent conceptual framework for following the causal chain of business mishaps back to their sources, spotting the often obscure red flags that allow managers to respond in time to head off catastrophe, and focusing on the key performance and economic metrics to monitor. He illustrates these ideas with lucid post-mortems of a number of disasters in and out of the corporate world, as well as instructive examinations of how companies like General Motors have used real-time tracking to improve a variety of business functions, including inventory, production scheduling and sales. McGee is rather sanguine about the predictability of the world, and he too easily dismisses the danger that a flood of real-time business information could prompt executives to concentrate even more narrowly on the here and now and indulge in an orgy of micromanagement. But managers looking for ways to improve their understanding of the businesses they run will find much valuable information here.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Kenneth W. McGee is a group vice president and Research Fellow in Gartner Research, where he serves as the director of research in the business management and e-business sector.