What’s it like to blog?

One SAS blogger shares his experience

By Gary Cokins

Initially, when SAS suggested I start a blog about performance management, I was skeptical. Will my blog be one more of the millions of blogs in the blogosphere that will rarely be read? Will I have any impact on those who will read it?

Frankly, I am still discovering the answers to those questions, but by the end of 2007, I will have posted more than 40 individual blog posts at blogs.sas.com/cokins. The experience of composing each post can be exhilarating, and I have found myself constantly thinking of new ideas to add to my long list of future blog topics.

I am a careful observer of people and organizations that I interact with daily, and because my job involves extensive international travel – 35 global cities this year – I am fortunate to learn firsthand about what is happening in the field of performance management. Each trip stimulates a new topic for the blog. I am also an avid newspaper reader, less of the front page and much more of the editorials and letters (and, of course, the sports section … go Bears!); and there is always a gold nugget in the paper that sparks a new topic.

Fortunately, these sources keep me from getting writer’s block. Plus, I’ve learned to think like a sociologist rather than a business journalist in my approach to performance management. Every organization wants to improve its enterprise performance, but so many obstacles prevent it from advancing. Few of the obstacles are external, such as a market shift or a competitor’s innovation. Instead, the problems usually involve people, internal organizational dynamics and deficient technologies.

Several of the comments to my blog have taught me something else. Readers who comment on business blogs are genuinely passionate about the need for their organizations to improve. However, they do express personal concerns that organizations tend to zigzag excessively and muddle their way through the process of change.

A common theme among the comments is that organizations are over-managed but under-led. In this view, managing is about coping with complexity, which requires staffing plans and budgets. In contrast, leadership is about coping with change and requires vision and continuous inspiration for employees. Many commenters observe that their organizations are heavy on the micromanaging but too light on the leading.

Do you have similar problems in your organization? If you answered yes, you know why I will never have a shortage of blog topics – and why performance management is a great topic for a blog. Come check it out for yourself and leave me a comment, or browse some of the other excellent SAS blogs that might be of more interest to you. You can find them all at blogs.sas.com.

Bio: Gary Cokins, CPIM, is the Global Product Marketing Manager for Performance Management at SAS.