Metric Best Quotes

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves. This exposure to different cultural values and metrics then forces you to reexamine what seems obvious in your own life and to consider that perhaps it’s not necessarily the best way to live.

Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn, a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter. If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, this is the best season of your life. —WU MEN

We propose a different metric for the success of a relationship. Relationships that make us the best versions of ourselves are successes.

Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against.

Any metric that seizes your attention but doesn’t contribute to your health, well-being, or career is ultimately a distraction.

Being the best simply cannot be a Just Cause, because even if we are the best (based on the metrics and time frames of our own choosing), the position is only temporary. The game doesn’t end once we get there; it keeps going. And because the game keeps going, we often find ourselves playing defense to maintain our cherished ranking. Though saying “we are the best” may be great fodder for a rah-rah speech to rally a team, it makes for a weak foundation upon which to build an entire company. Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be “better.” “Better” suggests

It’s not easy to feel good about yourself when you are constantly being told you’re rubbish and/or part of the problem. That’s often the situation for people working in the public sector, whether these be nurses, civil servants or teachers. The static metrics used to measure the contribution of the public sector, and the influence of Public Choice theory on making governments more ‘efficient’, has convinced many civil-sector workers they are second-best. It’s enough to depress any bureaucrat and induce him or her to get up, leave and join the private sector, where there is often more money to be made. So public actors are forced to emulate private ones, with their almost exclusive interest in projects with fast paybacks. After all, price determines value. You, the civil servant, won’t dare to propose that your agency could take charge, bring a helpful long-term perspective to a problem, consider all sides of an issue (not just profitability), spend the necessary funds (borrow if required) and – whisper it softly – add public value. You leave the big ideas to the private sector which you are told to simply ‘facilitate’ and enable. And when Apple or whichever private company makes billions of dollars for shareholders and many millions for top executives, you probably won’t think that these gains actually come largely from leveraging the work done by others – whether these be government agencies, not-for-profit institutions, or achievements fought for by civil society organizations including trade unions that have been critical for fighting for workers’ training programmes.

People are not motivated by the bottom line. It’s about the human factor—and purpose is the driver. It’s what stirs our souls and inspires us to do great things over a sustained period of time.” Capitalism for these organizations capitalizes on human enterprise, not performance metrics. On people, not consumers. On relationships, not transactions. And on becoming the best company for the planet, not just on the planet.

Being the best simply cannot be a Just Cause, because even if we are the best (based on the metrics and time frames of our own choosing), the position is only temporary. The game doesn’t end once we get there; it keeps going. And because the game keeps going, we often find ourselves playing defense to maintain our cherished ranking. Though saying “we are the best” may be great fodder for a rah-rah speech to rally a team, it makes for a weak foundation upon which to build an entire company. Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state. Instead, they strive to be “better.” “Better” suggests a journey of constant improvement and makes us feel like we are being invited to contribute our talents and energies to make progress in that journey.

what. Content strategy asks these questions of stakeholders and clients: Why are we doing this? What are we hoping to accomplish, change, or encourage? How will we measure the success of this initiative and the content in it? What measurements of success or metrics do we need to monitor to know if we are successful? How will we ensure the web remains a priority? What do we need to change in resources, staffing, and budgets to maintain the value of communication within and from the organization? What are we trying to communicate? What's the hierarchy of that messaging? This isn't Sophie's Choice, but when you start prioritizing features on a homepage and allocating budget to your list of features and content needs, get ready to make some tough calls. What content types best meet the needs of our target audience and their changing, multiple contexts? What content types best fit the skills of our

The inertia pushing the water up the wall was caused by its rotation with respect to the metric field, which Einstein now reincarnated as an ether. As a result, he had to face the possibility that general relativity did not necessarily eliminate the concept of absolute motion, at least with respect to the metric of spacetime.26 It was not exactly a retreat, nor was it a return to the nineteenth-century concept of the ether. But it was a more conservative way of looking at the universe, and it represented a break from the radicalism of Mach that Einstein had once embraced. This clearly made Einstein uncomfortable. The best way to eliminate the need for an ether that existed separately from matter, he concluded, would be to find his elusive unified field theory. What a glory that would be! “The contrast between ether and matter would fade away,” he said, “and, through the general theory of relativity, the whole of physics would become a complete system of thought.

It occurred to me that we now as a culture, as a people have legitimately become the progeny of the Digital Age. Ostensibly, we subsist within a dehumanized frontier--a computational, compartmentalized, mathematized collectivist-grid. Metrics have prohibitively supplanted ethics. Alternately, the authentic aesthetic experience has been sacrificed and transposed by the new breed of evangelicals: the purveyors of the advertising industry. Thus the symbolic euphoria induced by the infomercial is celebrated as the new Delphic Oracle. Alas, we've transitioned from a carbon-based life form into an information-based, bio-mechanical, heuristically deprived and depleted entity best described as "a self-balancing 28-jointed adaptor-based biped, an electro-chemical reduction plant integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts." Consequently, we exist under the tyranny of hyper-specialization, which dislodges and disposes our sense of logic, proportion and humanity from both our cognitive and synaptic ballet.

A good metric is a ratio or a rate. Accountants and financial analysts have several ratios they look at to understand, at a glance, the fundamental health of a company. You need some, too. There are several reasons ratios tend to be the best metrics: • Ratios are easier to act on. Think about driving a car. Distance traveled is informational. But speed—distance per hour—is something you can act on, because it tells you about your current state, and whether you need to go faster or slower to get to your destination on time. • Ratios are inherently comparative. If you compare a daily metric to the same metric over a month, you’ll see whether you’re looking at a sudden spike or a long-term trend. In a car, speed is one metric, but speed right now over average speed this hour shows you a lot about whether you’re accelerating or slowing down. • Ratios are also good for comparing factors that are somehow opposed, or for which there’s an inherent tension. In a car, this might be distance covered divided by traffic tickets. The faster you drive, the more distance you cover—but the more tickets you get. This ratio might suggest whether or not you should be breaking the speed limit.

One of the best—and most easily available—ways we can become healthier and happier is through mindfulness and meditation. Every element of well-being is enhanced by the practice of meditation and, indeed, studies have shown that mindfulness and meditation have a measurable positive impact on the other three pillars of the Third Metric—wisdom, wonder, and giving.

LEADERSHIP ABILITIES Some competencies are relevant (though not sufficient) when evaluating senior manager candidates. While each job and organization is different, the best leaders have, in some measure, eight abilities. 1 STRATEGIC ORIENTATION The capacity to engage in broad, complex analytical and conceptual thinking 2 MARKET INSIGHT A strong understanding of the market and how it affects the business 3 RESULTS ORIENTATION A commitment to demonstrably improving key business metrics 4 CUSTOMER IMPACT A passion for serving the customer 5 COLLABORATION AND INFLUENCE An ability to work effectively with peers or partners, including those not in the line of command 6 ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT A drive to improve the company by attracting and developing top talent 7 TEAM LEADERSHIP Success in focusing, aligning, and building effective groups 8 CHANGE LEADERSHIP The capacity to transform and align an organization around a new goal You should assess these abilities through interviews and reference checks, in the same way you would evaluate potential, aiming to confirm that the candidate has displayed them in the past, under similar circumstances.

Without robust metrics the simulator is at best an expensive video game and at worst an adverse outcome waiting to happen.

A company at the top of its game has accumulated a number of rules of thumb—implicit assumptions and beliefs about what has been central to its success. New technologies and business models belie or change some of those assumptions, but they only seem sensible if the management team can become aware of those implicit assumptions and mind-sets and suspend them for a moment to contemplate the change. It’s very hard to do that with the inherited wisdom, experience, and lore of a company. This is why the failures of incumbents to capture the benefits of disruptive innovations are a result not of bad managers, but of good managers practicing what they have done best. Incremental innovations can quickly be scaled and incorporated. Disruptive innovations require changes in customer sets, business models, or performance metrics that are no longer consistent with what led to success in the past.

Rob yourself of sleep and you’ll find you do not function at your personal best.

For a company to innovate, it must create products and services that let consumers perform a job faster, better, more conveniently, and/or less expensively than before. To achieve this objective, companies must know what outcomes customers are trying to achieve (what metrics they use to determine how well a job is getting done) and figure out which technologies, products, and features will best satisfy the important outcomes that are currently underserved.

If You Only Track Five Metrics… Track as many of these as you can in your sales force automation system’s dashboards: New leads created per month (also, from what source). Conversion rate of leads to opportunities. Number of, and pipeline dollar value of, qualified opportunities created per month. This is the most important leading indicator of revenue! Conversion rates of opportunities to closed deals. Booked revenues in three categories: New Business, Add-On Business, Renewal Business.

Trust is a massive component of achieving a DevOps culture. Operations must trust that Development is doing what they are because it’s the best plan for the success of the product. Development must trust that QA isn’t really just there to sabotage their successes. The Product Manager trusts that Operations is going to give objective feedback and metrics after the next deployment. If any one part of the team doesn’t trust another part of the team, your tools won’t matter. Additionally, if you don’t trust the people who work for you, why are they working there? Why are you?

What do citizens expect of government agencies entrusted with crime control, risk control, or other harm reduction duties? The public does not expect that governments will be able to prevent all crimes or contain all harms. But they do expect government agencies to provide the best protection possible, and at a reasonable price, by being:           Vigilant, so they can spot emerging threats early, pick up on precursors and warning signs, use their imaginations to work out what could happen, use their intelligence systems to discover what others are planning, and do all this before much harm is done.           Nimble, flexible enough to organize themselves quickly and appropriately around each emerging crime pattern rather than being locked into routines and processes designed for traditional issues.           Skillful, masters of the entire intervention tool kit, experienced (as craftsmen) in picking the best tools for each task, and adept at inventing new approaches when existing methods turn out to be irrelevant or insufficient to suppress an emerging threat.8 Real success in crime control—spotting emerging crime problems early and suppressing them before they do much harm—would not produce substantial year-to-year reductions in crime figures, because genuine and substantial reductions are available only when crime problems have first grown out of control. Neither would best practices produce enormous numbers of arrests, coercive interventions, or any other specific activity, because skill demands economy in the use of force and financial resources and rests on artful and well-tailored responses rather than extensive and costly campaigns. Ironically, therefore, the two classes of metrics that still seem to wield the most influence in many departments—crime reduction and enforcement productivity—would utterly fail to reflect the very best performance in crime control. Further, we must take seriously the fact that other important duties of the police will never be captured through crime statistics or in measures of enforcement output. As NYPD Assistant Commissioner Ronald J. Wilhelmy wrote in a November 2013 internal NYPD strategy document:

The variety of styles and contexts found within this church movement gives the illusion of innovation and longevity, but when we begin to draw comparisons, we find that they are all similar in a few central ways—not theological convictions or spiritual concerns but assumptions about what best serves and attracts people. That latter concern, attractiveness, has come to define the movement. If there is anything that unifies the myriad flavors into a single category, it’s this phrase: the attractional church.

Learn: review key metrics (twenty minutes). What went well that week, and why? What went badly, and why? This will go best if you come up with a dashboard of key metrics to review. By “dashboard” I don’t mean some super sophisticated system set up by an IT department. I mean a spreadsheet with a few numbers on it.

allegedly abandoned identities as unbelievers. Today too many churches believe that we can reach the world with the message of Christ by appealing to people with the things of the world, with spectacle, showmanship, and production. Paul never thinks to do this. He never suggests that more of what you left behind is the best route to what lies ahead. You don’t win godly saints in worldly ways. You don’t turn sinners into saints with a worldly message.

One of my favorite examples comes from the heady days of America Online (AOL). The company would routinely send out CDs in an attempt to get people to sign up for its product. One group within the company, responsible for acquisitions, was given financial incentives for hitting subscription goals. And so all tactics were designed to do just that: sign people up. There were offers of 100 free hours in the first month, which became 250 free hours, then even 700 hours. I remember when the offer got to 1,000 free hours, as long as they were used in the first 45 days (which left 1.7 hours of sleep per night for anyone who could take advantage of the promotion). It worked. Whatever tactics the acquisition group members developed were designed to do one thing and one thing only—maximize their bonus. The problem was there was another group responsible for retention; they had to find ways to get all the people who had canceled their subscriptions to come back. By creating a system in which each group was preoccupied with its own metrics without concern for anyone else’s or even what would serve the company best, the leaders of AOL had effectively incentivized their people to find ways to cost the company more money.

It’s impossible to be good all the time. To sacrifice all the time. Or be perfect all the time, whatever the metric.

We recommend companies with new business models be patient for growth (to allow the market opportunity to unfold) but impatient for profit (as an early validation that the model works). A profitable business is the best early indication of a viable model. What Rules, Norms, and Metrics Are Standing in Your Way? In

The overarching best practice is to focus, get early wins to build trust, and build momentum based on these wins.

Every time you hop down to a new curve, you have the opportunity to recalibrate the metrics by which you gauge yourself. Just as a business moves from the messiness of start-up life to codifying process in order to scale, as you start to identify the metrics that measure what matters to you deeply, you'll be able to lock and load, then barrel up the y-axis of success. I don't know how you'll define success. Mine is best described by paraphrasing Samuel Johnson: the ultimate result of all ambition is to be happy at home. As you look to tip the odds of success in your favor, beware the undertow of the status quo—current stakeholders in your life and career, including family members, may encourage you to just keep doing what you are doing. The metrics you've always used to measure yourself are comfortable, and so are your established habits; performing well on your current path is practically automatic. You can almost convince yourself that staying put is the right thing. But there really is no such thing as "standing still."14 The "use it or lose it" principle applies to our brain cells just as it does to the muscles in our bodies. Neuroplasticity has a reverse function. Connections recede through lack of activation, while continual stimulation of neural pathways keeps them healthy and active, including—and especially—when you step back, down, or sideways.

What’s the first thing you do now before you visit a new restaurant for the first time or book a hotel room online? You probably ask a friend for a recommendation or you check out the reviews online. Now more than ever, the story your customers tell about you is a big part of your story. Word of mouth is accelerated and amplified. Trust is built digitally beyond the village. Reputations are built and lost in a moment. Opinions are no longer only shared one to one; they are broadcasted one to many, through digital channels. Those opinions live on as clues to your story. The cleanliness of your hotel bathrooms is no longer a secret. Guests’ unedited photos are displayed alongside a hotel brochure’s digital glossies. TripAdvisor ratings are proudly displayed by hotels and often say more about the standards guests can expect than do other, more established star ratings systems, such as the Forbes Travel Guide‘s ratings. Once-invisible brands and family-run hotels have had their businesses turned around by the stories their customers tell about them. “With 50 million reviews and counting, [TripAdvisor] is shaking the travel industry to its core.” —Nathan Labenz It turns out that people are more likely to trust the stories other people tell about you than to trust the well-lit Photoshopped images in your brochure. Reputation is how your idea and brand story are spread. A survey conducted by Chadwick Martin Bailey found that six in ten cruise customers said “they were less likely to book a cruise that received only one star.” There is no marketing more powerful than what one person says to another to recommend your brand. “Don’t waste money on expensive razors.” “Nice hotel; shame about the customer service.” In a world where online reputation can increase a hotel’s occupancy and revenue, trust has become a marketing metric. “[R]eputation has a real-world value.” —Rachel Botsman When we were looking to book a quiet, off-the-beaten-track hotel in Bali, the first place we looked wasn’t with the travel agents or booking.com. I jumped online and found that one of the area’s best-rated hotels on tripadvisor.com wasn’t a five-star resort but a modest family-run, three-star hotel that was punching well above its weight. This little fifteen-room hotel had more than 400 very positive reviews and had won a TripAdvisor Travellers Choice award. The reviews from the previous guests sealed the deal. The little hotel in Ubud was perfect. The reviews didn’t lie, and of course the place was fully booked with a steady stream of guests who knew where to look before taking a chance on a hotel room. Just a few years before, this $50-a-night hotel would have been buried amongst a slew of well-marketed five-star resorts. Today, thanks to a currency of trust, even tiny brands can thrive by doing the right thing and giving their customers a great story to tell.

One true measure of progress in Afghanistan is the relationship between the government and the people. The more the villagers support the government, the better the war is going. And this is relatively simple to measure. The best metric is how many people visit the district center every week. The presence of many elders indicated the government was doing well, because the people weren’t afraid to work with government staff.

1. What are the expected levels of performance? What are the expected attitudes or behaviors? How will we measure those? How will we know whether people are performing to expectation? What is the best practice? Let’s take a very simple example. How do you know if the salesperson is doing a good job in executing their deal strategy if you have no sales process, or incomplete/bad process metrics? Without these, you and they have no basis for knowing what great execution of a deal strategy is, so you have no basis for assessing an individual performance or coaching them.

Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder, and The Sleep Revolution: Transforming Your Life, One Night at a Time.

ONE OF THE best things about mathematics, and part of what makes it like poetry, is that it opens new spaces for her. New spaces inside her. Abstract spaces. Spaces in higher dimensions. Infinite-dimensional spaces. Spaces where it is not necessarily possible to measure sizes and distances in the usual way. Before she started studying mathematics, she considered it a given that it is always possible to measure the distance between two points. But now she knows that this is only possible when one is in what mathematicians call metric spaces—spaces in which there is a distance measurement, what mathematicians call a metric. Is there a human metric? Can a person be measured using letters and numbers?

A good metric to determine whether you’re accomplishing this objective is whether your company consistently earns best-place-to-work ratings from your employees.

Being the best simply cannot be a Just Cause, because even if we are the best (based on the metrics and time frames of our own choosing), the position is only temporary. The game doesn’t end once we get there; it keeps going. And because the game keeps going, we often find ourselves playing defense to maintain our cherished ranking. Though saying “we are the best” may be great fodder for a rah-rah speech to rally a team, it makes for a weak foundation upon which to build an entire company. Infinite-minded leaders understand that “best” is not a permanent state.

your first step to fracture the fear of investing more resources on growth is to track your finances on a monthly or quarterly basis. Your second step is to benchmark your growth against the right metric.

Earn Trust: Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. Leaders don’t believe their or their team’s body odor smells of perfume. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best. Dive Deep: Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, and are skeptical when metrics and anecdote differ. No task is beneath them. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit: Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. Deliver Results: Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.

Unfortunately, many remnants of Industrial Revolution management still remain. In an overzealous quest to be competitive, ensure quality, and comply with regulations, most large organizations have designed work environments that make it difficult for employees to experiment, stretch beyond their specialized roles, leverage their unique skills, or see the ultimate impact of their work. Most leaders today don’t personally believe that people work best under these conditions. But each generation of managers walks into organizations where there are deeply entrenched assumptions and policies about control through standardized performance metrics, incentives and punishments, promotion tournaments, and so on. As a result, organizations deactivate their employees’ seeking systems and activate their fear systems, which narrows their perception and encourages their submission.

In a data-driven world, that means making sure that everyone understands the objective, the data collected, the metrics, and how the primary decision maker is interpreting the evidence. Give others a chance to put forward their interpretations and views, if those differ, and get everyone on board; but also get inputs on other perspectives that that the decision maker may have missed. To help, you can remember this neat mnemonic, DECIDE: Define the problem. Establish the criteria. Consider all the alternatives. Identify the best alternative. Develop and implement a plan of action. Evaluate and monitor the solution and feedback when necessary. In other words, make sure that stakeholders are on board with each of these steps.

Think Human. Unless you’re in the business of sterilizing things, business is no place to be sterile. Have the boldness to look beyond numbers and spreadsheets and allow your heart to have a say in the matter. Bear in mind that the intangibles are every bit as real as the metrics—oftentimes even more important. The simplest way—and most effective way—to connect with human beings is to speak with a human voice. It may be necessary in your business to market to specific target groups, but bear in mind that every target is a human being, and human beings respond to Simplicity. Best advice: Just be true to your species.

Yielding is a principle that is often discussed in the martial arts: the idea is that there can be tremendous power in going with—and perhaps redirecting—rather than resisting the energy or attack that is coming your way. Likewise, in negotiations, yielding means “going with,” and not “giving in.” Doing so effectively requires a clear and unbiased understanding of how the other side views the situation, and of the metrics they will use to evaluate ideas and options. Sometimes the best response to a deep-rooted perspective is to yield to it: understand it, adopt it, and repurpose it to advance your position.

Immunomes Project, which uses AI and machine learning to home in on the most significant blood biomarkers. Their conclusion? The best gauges of our inflammation level—and our inflammatory age—are about 7,500 proteins. Edifice has condensed this large set to a core panel of five protein biomarkers—and their predictive power is startling. They can foretell frailty seven years before it happens. They can predict cardiovascular aging—arterial stiffness and heart thickness—even in currently healthy people. The Edifice blood test and iAge metric is also able to pinpoint people with undiagnosed autoimmune diseases. This technology is up and running today, and should be commercially available by mid-2022. It costs $250 per test, or you can get a subscription service for $60 per month. But Edifice isn’t stopping there. Once you know your iAge, what can you do to improve your outlook? Beyond lifestyle guidance, Edifice Health will also offer personalized supplements—currently under study by an Institutional Review Board—to improve a client’s inflammatory profile.

Some personal consumption decisions have a much greater impact than reusing plastic bags. One that is close to my heart is vegetarianism. The first major autonomous model decision I made was to become vegetarian, which I did at age 18 the day I left my parents’ home. This was an important and meaningful decision to me, and I remain vegetarian to this day. But how impactful was it, compared to other things I could do. I did it in large part because of animal welfare, but lets just focus on its effect on climate change. By going vegetarian, you avert around 0.8 tons of Carbon Dioxide equivalent every year. A metric that combines the effect of different greenhouse gases. This is a big deal, it is about 1/10th of my total carbon footprint. Over the course of 80 years, I would avert around 64 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. But it turns out that other things you can do are radically more impactful. Suppose that an American earning the median US income were to donate 10% of that income which would be about $3,000 to the clean air task force an extremely cost effective organization that promotes innovation in neglected clean energy technologies. According to the best estimate I know of, this donation would reduce the world carbon dioxide emissions by an expected 3,000 tons per year. This is far bigger than effect of going vegetarian for your entire life. Note that the funding situation in climate change is changing fast, so when you hear this, the clean air task force may already be fully funded. The organization giving what we can keeps up an up to date list of the best charities in climate and other areas.

Metrics are a common adjunct to the deployment pipeline in incremental change environments. If teams use this effort as a proof-of-concept, developers should gather appropriate metrics for both before and after scenarios. Gathering concrete data is the best way to for developers to vet the approach; remember the adage that demonstration defeats discussion.

The NPI process was deflating for morale. But figuring out how to “boost morale” is not Amazonian. Other companies have morale-boosting projects and groups with names like “Fun Club” and “Culture Committee.” They view morale as a problem to be solved by company-sponsored entertainment and social interaction. Amazon’s approach to morale was to attract world-class talent and create an environment in which they had maximum latitude to invent and build things to delight customers—and you can’t do that if every quarter some faceless process like NPI smites your best ideas. In chapter six, we discuss Amazon’s belief that focusing on controllable input metrics instead of output metrics drives meaningful growth. Morale is, in a sense, an output metric, whereas freedom to invent and build is an input metric. If you clear the impediment to building, morale takes care of itself.

You will make sure your team is working on the right opportunities at the right time through your efforts to hone the team’s focus. You’ll lead the field each day with the right people in the right roles in the right places with the right tools and the right resources through your efforts to build it. Your team will consistently execute through your efforts to drive the fundamentals. You will predict the future through measuring the right KPIs and metrics engrossing your responsibility to forecast. And you will drive fun through the creation, management, and optimization of an environment where your team is intrinsically inspired, so they’ll show up, do their best, stay, and tell their friends.

At Amazon, they take this principle to its logical extreme: a “single-threaded leader” is “100% dedicated and accountable” for pushing one solution forward. “The best way to undercut a strategic initiative is to make it someone’s part-time job,” writes Tom Godden, an enterprise strategist at Amazon Web Services.

The hazard of metrics so purely focused on monetary return on investment is that like so many metrics, they influence behavior. Already, universities at the very top of the rankings send a huge portion of their graduates into investment banking, consulting, and high-end law firms—all highly lucrative pursuits.48 These are honorable professions, but is it really in the best interests of the nation to encourage the best and the brightest to choose these careers?

the decline of trust leads to a new mindset in which “[a]voiding human choice in public decisions is not just a theory … but a kind of theology…. Human choice is considered too dangerous.” As a consequence, “Officials no longer are allowed to act on their best judgment”4 or to exercise discretion, which is judgment about what the particular situation requires.5 The result is overregulation: an ever tighter web of rules, including the proliferation of rules within organizations.

Often, indeed, individuals are most capable of deciding on the best provider of services. But not always, and in some domains choice is particularly fraught. In healthcare, for example, choices pertaining to physicians or hospitals are made either when patients are healthy and disinclined to bother with medical matters, or when they are sick and therefore more anxious about their decisions, which diminishes their ability to process complex and often conflicting metrics.

Focus on controllable input metrics. Amazon is relentless about identifying metrics that can be controlled and have the greatest impact on outputs such as free cash flow per share. This is not an easy process, because it requires patient trial and error as you seek the input metrics that best allow you to assume control of your desired results. Note too that this is not an argument for abandoning output metrics.

In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos did his best to leave Mondays and Thursdays unscheduled so he could spend the time “trawling for ideas, exploring his own site, sometimes just surfing the Web.

Ignore “Google” As one of the best known companies in the world and because it’s often cited as a pioneer in adopting OKRs, Google is always held as a benchmark in content and methodology for OKRs. Our suggestion is that you ignore any reference to Google in implementing your OKRs. First of all, things that work for Google might not necessarily work for your company. Second, our empirical research with more than 20 Google employees has shown that there’s no homogeneous format for OKRs within the company, or between departments (e.g., how sales or product treats the subject) or across geographies (e.g., how Brazil, the US, and Europe address the issue). We’ve even found that four of those people that dind’t even know what OKRs were, and many who used OKRs as a high-level task list, which it’s NOT. Some official Google resources on OKRs, such as their human resources website, re:Work, explain the methodology simplistically and give out terrible OKR examples (one suggested Objective is “Eat 5 Pies”). Finally, don’t learn about management from companies that don’t really need to be well-managed. Google is a money minting machine because of its Adwords advertising business, and it really doesn’t matter if it has a strategy or not, or how well it executes it: Cash will keep pouring in. For execution lessons, look at tougher businesses, like retail and manufacturing. That’s where management really can make or break a company.

You need to choose wisely: what are the two to five metrics that provide the best reflection of overall value stream performance?

For us, the scoreboard can’t be the only scoreboard. Warren Buffett has said the same thing, making a distinction between the inner scorecard and the external one. Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.

Whenever I see a company claim that it is number one or the best, I always like to look at the fine print to see how they cherry-picked the metrics.

By focusing on key metrics, and worrying less about adherence to estimates, budgets, and plans, tech companies remove a lot of the drama that comes with the traditional project and put all their energy and focus into the work and the customer instead.

One of the greatest challenges educators and parents face is getting students engaged in their own learning. Particularly in middle school and high school, a large segment of students is doing as little as possible to get by. Even some top students take what Ned calls a “station-to-station” attitude, refusing to do anything that doesn’t contribute to a grade.2 We’re not raising curious learners who are motivated to develop their own minds. We’re raising kids who are overly focused on metrics and outcomes. The best thing you can do to facilitate engagement in the classroom may be to give your kid autonomy outside of it.

They can even end up pitting coworkers against one another, accidentally promoting behaviors that undermine the progress of the group as a whole. One of my favorite examples comes from the heady days of America Online (AOL). The company would routinely send out CDs in an attempt to get people to sign up for its product. One group within the company, responsible for acquisitions, was given financial incentives for hitting subscription goals. And so all tactics were designed to do just that: sign people up. There were offers of 100 free hours in the first month, which became 250 free hours, then even 700 hours. I remember when the offer got to 1,000 free hours, as long as they were used in the first 45 days (which left 1.7 hours of sleep per night for anyone who could take advantage of the promotion). It worked. Whatever tactics the acquisition group members developed were designed to do one thing and one thing only—maximize their bonus. The problem was there was another group responsible for retention; they had to find ways to get all the people who had canceled their subscriptions to come back. By creating a system in which each group was preoccupied with its own metrics without concern for anyone else’s or even what would serve the company best, the leaders of AOL had effectively incentivized their people to find ways to cost the company more money.

It sounds as if we’re assessing the quality of a work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we’re doing the opposite—deciding first which painting is the best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality.

We get paid much more to keep someone on dialysis than to keep them off of it. If we don’t achieve dialysis metrics—like avoiding dialysis catheters or providing a certain dose of dialysis—known to best result in long-term benefits, we are financially penalized. But create a fistula in a little old lady that usually requires interventions to make it work and keep it working and make her stay on the dialysis machine as long as it takes for the numbers to look right, then essentially get a bonus. If we see an in-center hemodialysis patient four times in a month, we stand to make 50 percent more money than if we only saw her once. And the nephrologist really only has to see the patient once each month—if a physician assistant sees the patient the other times, we still get paid. We would have to document a comprehensive medical history and examination over the better part of an hour with a patient returning to clinic twice to see the same money—and good luck trying to justify why that was clinically necessary to do. The second, third, and fourth in-center hemodialysis patient visits can be more like drive-bys—a simple documentation that we (or the physician assistant) “saw” the patient, with no notation of time required. Private insurance companies and the Medicare ESRD program pay top dollar for dialysis care, not clinic visits. It’s profitable to build another dialysis center, but we haven’t figured out how to build comprehensive outpatient palliative care services.

The Bedrock principle of influencing behavior is this: People tend to take the path of least resistance. Ease is the single best predictor of behavior, intentions, price, quality, or satisfaction. There's a little-known marketing metric for measuring ease called the Customer Effort Score that comes down to a simple question: how easy was it? How customers answer that one question explains one-third of their willingness to buy again, to increase their business with the company, or to rave about it to other people. While one-third may not sound like much, it's actually huge; the Customer Effort Score is 12% more predictive of customer loyalty than customer satisfaction is. Ease makes people happy and effort can really piss people off. Pg. 41

According to one Egyptian account, the formation of the world was the realization of a concept first developed within the mind of the Creator. Leibniz had a similar idea. He imagined God as a kind of super computer, calculating every possible world and scoring them all according to some divine scale or metric. Once the Creator had analyzed all possible worlds in his mind (all potentialities), he made actual the world that had scored highest and was thus the best of all possible worlds. If you think this world is bad, you should see the alternatives!

Traffic and visitor counts are, frankly, B.S., flung about by fools and social media promoters and charlatans like monkeys at the zoo fling feces. It’s meaningless. Only traffic converted to prospects and customers, converted to sales and profits count. Be very wary of all the “new metrics” gobbledygook. There’s no line for it on a bank deposit slip.

Vanity metrics wreak havoc because they prey on a weakness of the human mind. In my experience, when the numbers go up, people think the improvement was caused by their actions, by whatever they were working on at the time. That is why it’s so common to have a meeting in which marketing thinks the numbers went up because of a new PR or marketing effort and engineering thinks the better numbers are the result of the new features it added. Finding out what is actually going on is extremely costly, and so most managers simply move on, doing the best they can to form their own judgment on the basis of their experience and the collective intelligence in the room. Unfortunately, when the numbers go down, it results in a very different reaction: now it’s somebody else’s fault. Thus, most team members or departments live in a world where their department is constantly making things better, only to have their hard work sabotaged by other departments that just don’t get it. Is it any wonder these departments develop their own distinct language, jargon, culture, and defense mechanisms against the bozos working down the hall? Actionable metrics are the antidote to this problem. When cause and effect is clearly understood, people are better able to learn from their actions. Human beings are innately talented learners when given a clear and objective assessment.

6. Depending On Activity Metrics Rather Than A Proven Process “Dials per day” isn’t nearly as useful as tracking “call conversations per day” or “appointments per week”. What’s your step-by-step process and waterfall? Measure results that are proven to lead to revenue rather than throwing lots of activity at a goal.

Caroline’s project faces extreme uncertainty: there had never been a volunteer campaign of this magnitude at HP before. How confident should she be that she knows the real reasons people aren’t volunteering? Most important, how much does she really know about how to change the behavior of hundreds of thousand people in more than 170 countries? Barlerin’s goal is to inspire her colleagues to make the world a better place. Looked at that way, her plan seems full of untested assumptions—and a lot of vision. In accordance with traditional management practices, Barlerin is spending time planning, getting buy-in from various departments and other managers, and preparing a road map of initiatives for the first eighteen months of her project. She also has a strong accountability framework with metrics for the impact her project should have on the company over the next four years. Like many entrepreneurs, she has a business plan that lays out her intentions nicely. Yet despite all that work, she is—so far—creating one-off wins and no closer to knowing if her vision will be able to scale. One assumption, for example, might be that the company’s long-standing values included a commitment to improving the community but that recent economic trouble had resulted in an increased companywide strategic focus on short-term profitability. Perhaps longtime employees would feel a desire to reaffirm their values of giving back to the community by volunteering. A second assumption could be that they would find it more satisfying and therefore more sustainable to use their actual workplace skills in a volunteer capacity, which would have a greater impact on behalf of the organizations to which they donated their time. Also lurking within Caroline’s plans are many practical assumptions about employees’ willingness to take the time to volunteer, their level of commitment and desire, and the way to best reach them with her message. The Lean Startup model offers a way to test these hypotheses rigorously, immediately, and thoroughly. Strategic planning takes months to complete; these experiments could begin immediately. By starting small, Caroline could prevent a tremendous amount of waste down the road without compromising her overall vision. Here’s what it might look like if Caroline were to treat her project as an experiment.

will slow down the process and add no value—and might become dangerous if momentum is built behind them. So there is a drive to expected, straightforward options that stay relatively close to home. Then, the options are typically assessed using a single metric: the financial plausibility test. A high net present value or internal rate of return helpfully buttresses the claim that a particular option is the best choice.

I’ve argued that the good data that effective metrics provide are essential to advancing the science at the heart of evidence-based medicine. But I’ve also argued that not all metrics or standards are created equal, and we should not equate metric-tracking with trust-building, because to do so misses a crucial point: What looks good on paper and what drives the best outcomes in practice can be two very different things. Too often, what looks good on paper is what is possible to measure, not necessarily what is actually the best approach to caring for patients. And when we consider the costs of abiding by and tracking and reporting all of these metrics—the four hours of physician time, the eight hours of care team time, the $8 billion we spend as a nation every year—it’s pretty clear that we’re interfering with those best, relationship-building approaches. Instead of spending so much more of our national time, resources, and attention in medicine on creating artificial metrics designed to incentivize good physician and provider behavior while unwittingly reinforcing bad behavior, let’s give the art of medicine the room it needs to build trusting relationships in the way that the best doctors and medical practices have always done so: honestly, naturally, compassionately, and with the best outcomes for the patient squarely in mind.

If You Only Track Five Metrics…

Over a 20-year period, methane is estimated to have a warming effect on Earth’s atmosphere 84 times that of carbon dioxide. By that metric, the Aliso Canyon leak produced the same amount of global warming as 1,735,404 cars in a full year. During the four months the leak lasted—25 days longer than the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—the leak contributed roughly the same amount of warming as the greenhouse-gas emissions produced by the entire country of Lebanon.

The best way to achieve alignment is to sequentially move through a series of structured discussions that clarify the organization’s strategy, defining precisely what differentiating capabilities are required, then to examine all the systems of choices that develop that capability: work processes; structure and governance; information and metrics; people and rewards; continuous improvement; and culture and leadership (fig. 1.5). These are the conversations entailed in organization alignment. They can—and should—be quick and to the point. But these critical conversations should not be skipped.

Use tools like Alexa and Klout that measure influence to get a rough metric for who’s dominating a particular space. Peruse Twitter for best-of lists and to see who’s most frequently retweeted, then become their most charming stalker. Connect to them in social media, listen to what they’re saying, and over time, weigh in. Once you know what would truly interest them, upgrade communications with a value-added email ping. Don’t worry if you don’t get a response; in a month, send another. Watch for opportunities to meet these people in person at conferences, book signings, and other events.

Because of that, I realized that the outcome is not the outcome. In other words, what we think of as endpoints to a goal are really just forks in a road that is endlessly forking. In the big picture of our lives, we really don’t know whether a particular success or failure is actually helping or hurting us. So the metric I now use to judge my efforts and goals is: Did I do my best, given who I was and what I knew at that particular time? And what can I learn from the outcome to make my best better next time?

Charles Koch loved the idea, and so did Markel. Getting rid of budgets would instantly dispose of hours’ worth of drudgery that defined a financial controller’s life. Koch invented a new set of metrics to replace budgets. And the numbers that the company focused upon were telling. Charles Koch didn’t care much about sales or costs—he cared about profits. He wanted to know how profitable any line of business was and how profitable it could be under the right management. He steered all of his managers to think this way. The key thing they needed to focus on was the return on investment, or ROI—what was the best use of Koch Industries’ money? Soon each division was writing a profit goal for the quarter, rather than a budget.

The best changes often go unnoticed, moving from one moment of stability to another, with teams and organizations feeling stable at every step. The key tools for leading efficient change are systems thinking, metrics, and vision. When the steps of change are too wide, teams get destabilized, and gaps open within them. In those moments, managers create stability by becoming glue.