Profiles In Performance

Too many organizations invest in performance management and business intelligence projects, without first establishing the needed conditions to ensure success. But the organizations that lay the groundwork for effective change first reap the benefits. In Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Road Map for Change, Howard Dresner (author of The Performance Management Revolution) worked with several extraordinary organizations to understand their thriving "performance-directed culture." In doing so, he developed a unique maturity model-which served as both a filter to select candidates and as a lens to examine accomplishments. Interviews with people from all sides of the organization: business users, finance, senior management and the IT department Provides a complete picture of their progress from inception to current state The models, analyses and real world accounts from these cases will be an invaluable resource to any organization hoping to improve or initiate their own performance-directed culture.

This study has two central research questions: Do democracy profiles affect policy performance? And what causes democracy profiles? Oliver Schlenkrich conceptualizes and measures different democracy profiles (e.g., libertarian-majoritarian or egalitarian-majoritarian democracies) based on trade-offs between the central democracy dimensions of political freedom, political equality, and political and legal control. In addition, the study conceptually and empirically develops a typology of political performance. Regarding the first research question, the empirical analyses of about 80 democracies from 1974 to 2017 indicate that there is not an overall better performing democracy profile. Thereby, the democracy profiles do not have an immediate effect, instead their effects require a longer period of time to manifest. With respect to the second research question, the empirical findings show that several structural and cultural factors are relevant (e.g., British heritage or a competitive culture). This work is mainly based on Bayesian statistics to cope with the complexity of the data and models. About the authorOliver Schlenkrich works currently on the DFG research project ‘Causes of Transformation and Democracy Profiles: Empirical Findings of the Democracy Matrix’ located at the Institute of Political Science and Sociology, University of Wuerzburg, Germany. His research interests concern democracy, political culture, political participation, quality of statehood, and quantitative methods.

Not only did Westinghouse win the first annual Malcolm Baldrige Quality Award in 1988, its Productivity and Quality Center (PQC) also trained such other Baldrige winners as Motorola, Xerox, Texas Instruments, Eastman-Kodak, and Milliken. Now, a key member of the PQC shares the never-before-published techniques that have saved Westinghouse and its quality trainees millions of dollars. Written in a direct, how-to style, this book focuses on cost-time management, showing readers how to look at the overall goals of the organization and pinpoint ways to reduce the time and cost of getting things done. Quality engineers and managers will learn to map all business transactions as a series of costs over time, to measure the effectiveness of their programs, and to prove their results to top management. Case studies from Westinghouse and its trainees illustrate the many principles discussed.

Inlet air velocity profile tests were conducted on a full-scale short-length 102-centimeter-diameter annual combustor designed for advanced gas turbine engine applications. The inlet profiles studied include radial distortions that were center peaked, and tip peaked, as well as a circumferential distortion which was center peaked for one-third of the circumference and flat for the other two-thirds. An increase in combustor pressure loss was the most significant effect of the radial air velocity distortions. With the circumferential distortion, exit temperature pattern factor doubled when compared to a flat velocity profile.