Reinventing Drucker's "Management by Objectives" through Strengths?

One of the remarkable common points between Peter Drucker's thinking and "First Break All the Rules" (FBATR) is captured by the following quotation:

"So this is their [= the great managers'] dilemma: The manager must retain control and focus people on performance. But she is bound by her belief that she cannot force everyone to perform in the same way. 

The solution is as elegant as efficient: Define the right outcomes and then let each person find his own route toward those outcomes." (FBATR, p. 110)

I find this principle surprisingly similar to Peter Drucker's famous "Management by Objectives (MBO)" which "was popular in the 1960s adn 1970s" but "which is now largely ignored" (according to The Economist's "Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus" p. 122). According to Drucker, MBO was crucial to give an enterprise the unity of direction and effort of a management team. But it was also a way of "empowering" your employees (a buzzword which Drucker never liked too much):

"The greatest advantage of management by objectives is perhaps that it makes it possible for a manager to control his own performance. Self-control means stronger motivation: a desire to do the best rather than do just enough to get by." (Drucker in Management, p. 439)

Again, there is a remarkable parallel to "First Break All The Rules" here (p.111 f.):

"this solution [= defining the right outcomes] encourages employees to take responsibility. Great managers want each employee to feel a certain tension, a tension to achieve. Defining the right outcomes creates that tension."

But Buckingham and Coffman ask a very good question:

"If defining outcomes rather than methods is so elegant and so efficient, why don't more managers do just that? ... Every manager has his own reasons, but in the end it is probably the allure of control is just too tempting. "

This "allure" of control is best described by Drucker when he writes about the "top man in a company - especially in a small or fair-sized company that has been growing fast -" when the time for change in his role and behavior arrives:

"What is demanded of the top man is indeed a great deal. He has to accept that he no longer can be the virtuoso performer. Instead he has to become the "conductor". Where he prides himself... on knowing everybody in the company, on knowing every customer, on knowing everything that went on, and on making every decision and solving every problem, he now has to manage by objectives for managers and through their self-control. Where formerly he was the court of last resort - and very often the court of first resort as well - he now has to have a management structure. Where he "knows how to do everything", he now has to let people do it their own way." (Management, p. 779)

Yet, I believe that the temptation to control is not the only obstacle for a strengths-based reinvention of management by objectives. It is often quite difficult to define the right objectives. Drucker's "acid test" is this:

"These [performance] measurements need not be rigidly quantitative; nor need they they be exact. But they have to be clear, simple, and rational. They have to be relevant and direct attention and efforts where they should go. They have to be reliable - at least to the point where their margin of error is acknowledged and understood. And they have to be, so to speak, self-explanatory, understandable without complicated interpretation or philosophical discussions." (Management p. 440)

Well, if it was only that easy! As a real-life manager, I find defining the right objectives and keeping them simple quite a challenge in my daily work. And maybe I am not the only one who feels that way. For after a while, Drucker himself downplayed the significance of MBO with the following argument:

"MBO is just another tool. It is not the great cure for management inefficiency... Management by objectives works if you know the objectives: 90% of the times you don't."

This quotation is from the above mentioned "Guide to Ideas and Gurus." Unfortunately, I could never track down the original source. I am afraid it may not be the correct quotation, as I found a slightly different version in the internet:

 "Management by objectives works if you first think through your objectives. Ninety percent of the time you haven't"

Either way, I find this observation both sad and hilarious at the same time. For I have researched the literature about defining the right objectives and measuring performance and among other ideas studied the Balanced Scorecard;  yet, I often felt that when you try to put these ideas into practice, they are soon everything else than "self-explanatory, understandable without complicated interpretation or philosophical discussions".

Therefore, my question goes to you, dear Bloggers: what experiences have you made with regard to this? What can you recommend?