Published in early 2021, Relative Targets became the 3rd Work the System approach from Red42. Relative Targets is nothing less than the reinvention of performance systems for organizations of all kinds: A powerful and elegant social technology for all organizations with 25 people or more.

Relative Targets is different than other performance system approaches: It scales naturally. It does not require external training or maintenance. It drives out coercion. It makes annual target-setting and planning exercises superfluous, while increasing transparency and control dramatically. Most importantly: It empowers teams (or "cells") to act as highly responsible mini-enterprises. Pioneers of Relative Targets have operated this kind of performance system for decades, and have become undisputed leaders of their industries.

Get going with Relative Targets at any time. You can go live with a Relative Targets performance system within just a few months.
It's about time.

RELATIVE TARGETS:
HIGH PERFORMANCE, ENABLED

THE CONCEPT AND ITS FOUNDATION

Niels Pflaeging has been pioneering Relative Targets for around 20 years, since he joined the Beyond Budgeting Round Table as a director, in 2003.

The BetaCodex Network white paper No. 10, Making Performance Work, from 2009, is testament to Niels' research and practical work with clients. In 2021, with dozens of performance-systems-related client projects under his belly, Niels turned Relative Targets into a free-to-use, open source social technology that's about to revolutionize performance management and organizational leadership.

See the terms of licensing below!

Free PSD of a Man Holding a Poster Mockup6.jpg

LEARNING RESOURCES AND QUALIFICATIONS

Red42 offers several education and qualification formats around Relative Targets. One is the Quick Start format – a high-impact 2-hour online course to get you acquainted with the approach.

In addition, we offer 1-day face-to-face workshops for more in-depth qualification. From 2024, we will also offer a complete online qualification course: Become a Certified Relative Targets Practitioner!

For companies, we deliver highly customized, iterative workshop sequences that allow you to flesh out your organization's relative performance system, under our conceptual guidance. Our implementation approach allows you to transform your performance system, within just a couple of months.

Forthcoming: The handbook on Relative Targets. Already available: The concept overview poster. What more to expect: The learning box with books, posters, and exclusive work sheets.

What can relative targets do
for your company?

Use this powerful Work the System approach by Red42 to enable high performance, sustainably.

Get everyone aligned

Clear challenges und unity of purpose - for all teams. At all times.

Ignite team spirit

With Relative Targets, there is no reason why collaboration should not happen.

Make business the priority

Focus everyone on business, clients, profitability – not plans, targets, incentives

Simplify the pay system

Relative Pay puts fairness and simplicity back at the heart of compensation.

Turn reporting insightful

Relative Reporting is simple to operate and easy to understand - for literally everyone!!

Reduce managerial effort

Liberate managers from the numbing tasks of planning, target-setting and appraisal

Unleash cost awareness

Team P&Ls, and complete financial oversight heighten business accumen

Improve oversight

It's easy to produce transparency with a Relative Targets system.

Drive out waste

Once teams buy internal services through internal markets, wasteful behavior ends.

Structure for leanness

When cells in the periphery own the resources they earn business spirit arises

Produce clarity of purpose

Relative Reporting is clean, fast, open to everyone and reduced to the max.

Make winning fun

League tables among teams in the perhiphery induce healthy competition.

"A company is successful and will survive if
it gives a higher return than other companies in the same field. The real target is thus not an absolute sum in dollars and cents but a relative one. Beating the competition is the real target."
Jan Wallander (1920-2016)

The open source license

Relative Targets and the BetaCodex are freely available, open-source social technologies: You are free to derive from Relative Targets and create innovative, new works yourself, and share your innovations with others, and also commercialize them.

Relative Targets, as outlined in our publications and as described through the concept overview, as well as related events, principles, roles, workshop formats, consulting techniques and related documents are published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. This license is an open source license: Under this license, you are strongly encouraged to innovate by freely developing applications based upon Relative Targets.

Concept overview

Use and share the Relative Targets concept overview freely!
It will soon become available as a poster in several languages. Concept overview version 2021B.

Open source license
Attribution ShareAlike – “CC-BY-SA”

This license lets you remix, tweak, and build upon Relative Targets, even for commercial reasons.

In so doing, you agree to:

credit the original author, Niels Pflaeging,
and provide our specified link to the source material, as listed below,
and license your derivative creations to others under the identical terms.

Specifically, you must provide and prominently display the following link with any and all derived works, and included as part of all related graphics you develop:

“This work is derived from Relative Targets, an open source, free social technology by Niels Pflaeging, published under the CC-BY-SA-4.0 license from Creative Commons, and found here: www.redforty2.com/relativetargets."

"Market economy within a company means:
the center serves the periphery, instead of managing it. Internal markets reveal what is needed and must be done – and what doesn't! Without turning that into commands."
Silke Hermann

About Red42

RELATIVE TARGETS:
HIGH PERFORMANCE, ENABLED

THE CONCEPT AND ITS FOUNDATION

LEARNING RESOURCES AND QUALIFICATIONS

What can relative targets do
for your company?

"A company is successful and will survive if
it gives a higher return than other companies in the same field. The real target is thus not an absolute sum in dollars and cents but a relative one. Beating the competition is the real target."
Jan Wallander (1920-2016)

The open source license

Concept overview

Open source license
Attribution ShareAlike – “CC-BY-SA”

"Market economy within a company means:
the center serves the periphery, instead of managing it. Internal markets reveal what is needed and must be done – and what doesn't! Without turning that into commands."
Silke Hermann

Related papers and articles
By Niels Pflaeging

Videos on Relative Targets
With Red42

RELATIVE TARGETS: HIGH PERFORMANCE, ENABLED

THE CONCEPT AND ITS FOUNDATION

LEARNING RESOURCES AND QUALIFICATIONS

What can relative targets do for your company?

"A company is successful and will survive if it gives a higher return than other companies in the same field. The real target is thus not an absolute sum in dollars and cents but a relative one. Beating the competition is the real target." Jan Wallander (1920-2016)

The open source license

Concept overview

Open source license Attribution ShareAlike – “CC-BY-SA”

"Market economy within a company means: the center serves the periphery, instead of managing it. Internal markets reveal what is needed and must be done – and what doesn't! Without turning that into commands." Silke Hermann

Related papers and articles By Niels Pflaeging

Videos on Relative Targets With Red42

RELATIVE TARGETS:
HIGH PERFORMANCE, ENABLED

What can relative targets do
for your company?

"A company is successful and will survive if
it gives a higher return than other companies in the same field. The real target is thus not an absolute sum in dollars and cents but a relative one. Beating the competition is the real target."
Jan Wallander (1920-2016)

Open source license
Attribution ShareAlike – “CC-BY-SA”

"Market economy within a company means:
the center serves the periphery, instead of managing it. Internal markets reveal what is needed and must be done – and what doesn't! Without turning that into commands."
Silke Hermann

Related papers and articles
By Niels Pflaeging

Videos on Relative Targets
With Red42