The result structure consists of three levels: key results, which organize the business at the highest level; end results, which are produced directly from performance; and set results, which organize end results into chains and sets within each key result. For example, a key result “sold product or service” may include a set result “order fulfilled,” which may include end results reflecting performance for order booked, order filled, order invoiced, order inspected, order delivered, and invoice paid. Likewise, a key result called “serviced customer” may include a set result “satisfied customer” that includes such end results as returns handled, complaints handled, and satisfaction surveyed.

In the rows of the grid, the company's performance structure organizes capital into specific performance solutions so that the company can manage, support, and utilize its capital to produce specific results. So the performance solutions “market analysis” and “competitor profile” are organized under the performance solution type “intelligence,” which itself is in the capital category “management.”

The business structure in exhibit 2 replaces all the 20th-century management structures that are laid over the company's business. Some 20th-century structures, like business processes and information systems, are defined as performance solutions that produce specific results along a value-quality chain. Other facets of 20th-century management, such as HR job descriptions and salary scales or performance scorecards, may be inappropriate for 21st-century management. If they're needed, they can be refined and incorporated — along with financial accounting, which remains necessary because of external reporting requirements — into performance solutions as facility records, human capability, or management intelligence. Some overlaid supply chain, logistics, and customer management processes can be redefined as result chains. Project management activities may be replaced by separate, subsidiary, project-specific business structures that utilize assigned capital to produce completed project investment results. All other 20th-century structures and associated data collection and processing activities that are currently laid over the business — such as the organizational structure, fixed-asset management, activity costing, data reconciliation and enterprise information management, and many reporting structures — are eliminated under R-pM because they're no longer needed.

R-pM's single business structure, combining a performance structure and a result structure, is used for all business organization, planning, direction, control, and reporting. All 20th-century management concepts, approaches, conventions, definitions, and standards related to overlaid structures are completely superseded by one simplified set of 21st-century management conventions, definitions, and standards.

What This Means in Terms of Organizing People

With R-pM, a company uses the performance/result grid in exhibit 2 as its organizational structure. Organizational units are deployed as business organization solutions, and managers are deployed as human personnel solutions to produce a set of specific results. A subset of the overall business structure can be inverted to show the results and deployed performance solutions under the responsibility of a given organizational or business unit, or a particular manager. Responsible business units manage results, along with the specific solutions utilized to produce those results. They are supported by capital management business units, which are populated by performance management professionals who specialize in managing a specific category of capital. The business structure, like that in exhibit 2, defines the responsibilities of each unit, and it is updated for each change in results or performance.

Each result in the business structure is under the responsibility of a result manager. Exhibit 3, below, details some of the concerns result managers face in producing a specified set of results using the available performance solutions. Result managers must understand the relationships among results, the volume of results they can expect to produce by deploying a certain capacity of performance solutions, the value and cost of the results they produce, the determinants of and corporate standards for result quality, the risks involved in producing their results, and the potential to improve results by improving performance solutions' effectiveness. They also must learn to use questions like those in exhibit 3 to analyze symptoms of problems with performance solutions that prevent the best possible result, to define their requirements for new performance solutions, and to determine whether new goals for result value added are reasonable in substantiating development efforts. All of the objectives, targets, plans, duties, and assignments within the 21st-century enterprise are defined in terms of specific results and result-value-added goals. All management is result management, focused on producing results to achieve goals.