Performance Metrics Quotes

The board, in collaboration with management, crafts a strategic roadmap that defines the specific steps required to achieve the vision. This roadmap translates the company's "why" and "when" into a practical "how," outlining key milestones, resource allocation, and performance metrics.

Organizational structure and management style are those two factors that we always forget to analyze when the performance of our businesses goes down.

Shaping the company's future requires understanding the key drivers of value for the company and establishing metrics to measure progress.

If the company is going to thrive financially, then the board must understand the relationship between different financial metrics and how they impact overall financial performance.

The history professor Nelson Lichtenstein told me, “What you can’t measure, you can’t reward,” and that may be why executives are so focused on work hours. For decades, the corporate world has been consumed with metrics. Managers love tangible measures by which they can determine success or failure. Work hours is one of the easiest ways to measure employee performance, but total hours worked is a meaningless statistic.

As business leaders we need to understand that lack of data is not the issue. Most businesses have more than enough data to use constructively; we just don't know how to use it. The reality is that most businesses are already data rich, but insight poor.

Benchmarking is a key component of performing exceptionally well on ESG metrics.

Performance metrics are numbers in context, results related to the strategic goals of the business.

In a nutshell, Blue Ocean Strategy is about creating completely new industries through fundamental differentiation as opposed to competing in existing industries by tweaking established models. Rather than outdoing competitors in terms of traditional performance metrics, Kim and Mauborgne advocate creating new, uncontested market space through what the authors call value innovation.

In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signaling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicizing the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.

Use evaluation tools such as performance surveys, metrics, and formal reviews to document all aspects of a person’s performance.It’s

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.

Eventually, the performance of a classifier, computational power as well as predictive power, depends heavily on the underlying data that are available for learning. The five main steps that are involved in training a machine learning algorithm can be summarized as follows: Selection of features. Choosing a performance metric. Choosing a classifier and optimization algorithm. Evaluating the performance of the model. Tuning the algorithm.

Use evaluation tools such as performance surveys, metrics, and formal reviews to document all aspects of a person’s performance.It’s hard to have an objective, open-minded, emotion-free conversation about performance if there is no data to discuss. It’s also hard to track progress.

The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics. Our emphasis is on what we call controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price). We detail these metrics as well as how to discover and track them in chapter six.

If what is actually measured is a reasonable proxy for what is intended to be measured, and if it is combined with judgment, then measurement can help practitioners to assess their own performance, both for individuals and for organizations. But problems arise when such measures become the criteria used to reward and punish—when metrics become the basis of pay-for-performance or ratings.

Using velocity as a productivity metric has several flaws. First, velocity is a relative and team-dependent measure, not an absolute one. Teams usually have significantly different contexts which render their velocities incommensurable. Second, when velocity is used as a productivity measure, teams inevitably work to game their velocity. They inflate their estimates and focus on completing as many stories as possible at the expense of collaboration with other teams (which might decrease their velocity and increase the other team’s velocity, making them look bad). Not only does this destroy the utility of velocity for its intended purpose, it also inhibits collaboration between teams.

My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.” “To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.” “Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.” “Show me an incumbent bigco failing to adapt to change, I’ll show you top execs paid huge cash compensation for quarterly and annual goals.” “Every billionaire suffers from the same problem. Nobody around them ever says, ‘Hey, that stupid idea you just had is really stupid.’” “‘Far more money has been lost by investors trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.’—Peter Lynch

Almost all official statistics and policy documents on wages, income, gross domestic product (GDP), crime, unemployment rates, innovation rates, cost of living indices, morbidity and mortality rates, and poverty rates are compiled by governmental agencies and international bodies worldwide in terms of both total aggregate and per capita metrics. Furthermore, well-known composite indices of urban performance and the quality of life, such as those assembled by the World Economic Forum and magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and The Economist, primarily rely on naive linear combinations of such measures.6 Because we have quantitative scaling curves for many of these urban characteristics and a theoretical framework for their underlying dynamics we can do much better in devising a scientific basis for assessing performance and ranking cities. The ubiquitous use of per capita indicators for ranking and comparing cities is particularly egregious because it implicitly assumes that the baseline, or null hypothesis, for any urban characteristic is that it scales linearly with population size. In other words, it presumes that an idealized city is just the linear sum of the activities of all of its citizens, thereby ignoring its most essential feature and the very point of its existence, namely, that it is a collective emergent agglomeration resulting from nonlinear social and organizational interactions. Cities are quintessentially complex adaptive systems and, as such, are significantly more than just the simple linear sum of their individual components and constituents, whether buildings, roads, people, or money. This is expressed by the superlinear scaling laws whose exponents are 1.15 rather than 1.00. This approximately 15 percent increase in all socioeconomic activity with every doubling of the population size happens almost independently of administrators, politicians, planners, history, geographical location, and culture.

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.

If there are no metrics in place, how can you know how well the value stream is performing, let alone if it is getting better or worse?

Managing digital performance and improving business achievement as an iterative continuum means setting metrics, adjusting plans, measuring performance, and understanding results dynamically.

Each ran a highly decentralized organization; made at least one very large acquisition; developed unusual, cash flow–based metrics; and bought back a significant amount of stock. None paid meaningful dividends or provided Wall Street guidance. All received the same combination of derision, wonder, and skepticism from their peers and the business press. All also enjoyed eye-popping, credulity-straining performance over very long tenures (twenty-plus years on average).

Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10

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:

Metric is part of transparent visual management allowing pulling.

Performance metrics are numbers in context, results are related to your strategic goals.

IT metrics need to evolve to something that matters to the business audience; at the same time that “business sentiment” needs to get put into something more tangible.

As discussed in Chapter 2, data gathered from A/B tests by Ronny Kohavi, who directed Amazon’s Data Mining and Personalization group before joining Microsoft as General Manager of its Experimentation Platform, reveal that 60%–90% of ideas do not improve the metric they were intended to improve. Thus if we’re not running experiments to test the value of new ideas before completely developing them, the chances are that about 2/3 of the work we are doing is of either zero or negative value to our customers — and certainly of negative value to our organization, since this work costs us in three ways. In addition to the cost of developing the features, there is an opportunity cost associated with more valuable work we could have done instead, and the cost of the new complexity they add to our systems (which manifests itself as the cost of maintaining the code, a drag on the rate at which we can develop new functionality, and often, reduced operational stability and performance).

Designing for measurement combined with agility can increase campaign performance by a factor of five or more.

Value-based segmentation combined with event-driven marketing, to give customers the right product marketing at the right time, can increase performance by another five times or more.

normally and performance is not degrading over time. As your fundamental understanding of what drives the business improves, it’s common for the WBR to become an exception-based meeting rather than a regular one for discussing each and every metric.

The customer is also at the center of how we analyze and manage performance metrics. Our emphasis is on what we call controllable input metrics, rather than output metrics. Controllable input metrics (e.g., reducing internal costs so you can affordably lower product prices, adding new items for sale on the website, or reducing standard delivery time) measure the set of activities that, if done well, will yield the desired results, or output metrics (such as monthly revenue and stock price).

OP2 aligns each group with the goals of the company. Everybody knows their overall objectives, including targets for revenue, cost, and performance. The metrics are agreed upon and will be supplied as part of every team’s deliverables. OP2 makes it crystal clear what each group has committed to do, how they intend to achieve those goals, and what resources they need to get the work done. Some variances are inevitable, but any change to OP2 requires formal S-Team approval.

Improving numbers by lowering standards. One way of improving metric scores is by lowering the criteria for scoring. Thus, for example, graduation rates of high schools and colleges can be increased by lowering the standards for passing. Or airlines improve their on-time performance by increasing the scheduled flying time of their flights.

The suspicion of authority was intrinsic to the post-1960s political left: to rely upon the judgment of experts was to surrender to the prejudices of established elites. Thus, the left had its reasons for advancing an agenda that professed to make institutions accountable and transparent, using the purportedly objective and scientific standards of measured performance.

Our new care pathways were effective because they were led by physicians, enabled by real-time data-based feedback, and primarily focused on improving the quality of patient care,” which “fundamentally motivated our physicians to change their behavior.” Crucial too was the fact that “the men and women who actually work in the service lines themselves chose which care processes to change. Involving them directly in decision making secured their buy-in and made success more likely.” What we can learn from the Geisinger example is the importance of having providers develop and monitor performance measures. The fact that the measures were in keeping with their own professional sense of mission was crucial.

Goal displacement through diversion of effort to what gets measured. Goal displacement comes in many varieties. When performance is judged by a few measures, and the stakes are high (keeping one’s job, getting a raise, raising the stock price at the time that stock options are vested), people will focus on satisfying those measures—often at the expense of other, more important organizational goals that are not measured.1 Economists Bengt Holmström and Paul Milgrom have described it in more formal terms as a problem of misaligned incentives: workers who are rewarded for the accomplishment of measurable tasks reduce the effort devoted to other tasks.2 The result is that the metric means comes to replace the organizational ends that those means ought to serve.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits.

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits. Rule cascades. In an attempt to staunch the flow of faulty metrics through gaming, cheating, and goal diversion, organizations institute a cascade of rules. Complying with them further slows down the institution’s functioning and diminishes its efficiency.

Discouraging innovation. When people are judged by performance metrics, they are incentivized to do what the metrics measure, and what the metrics measure will be some established goal. But that impedes innovation, which means doing something that is not yet established, indeed hasn’t been tried out. Innovation involves experimentation. Trying out something new entails risk, including the possibility, perhaps probability, of failure.6 When performance metrics discourage risk they inadvertently promote stagnation.

Discouraging cooperation and common purpose. Rewarding individuals for measured performance diminishes the sense of common purpose as well as the social relationships that provide the unmeasureable motivation for cooperation and institutional effectiveness.7 Reward based on measured performance tends to promote not cooperation but competition. If the individuals or units respond to the incentives created, rather than aiding, assisting, and advising one another, they strive to maximize their own metrics, ignoring, or even sabotaging, their fellows. As Donald Berwick, a leading medical reformer, has recounted, One hospital CEO described to me his system of profit-center management, in which middle management bonuses depended on local budget performance. I asked him if one of his managers would transfer resources from his department to another’s if it would help the organization as a whole. “Yes,” the CEO answered honestly, “if he were crazy.

Degradation of work. Compelling the people in an organization to focus their efforts on the narrow range of what gets measured leads to a degradation of the experience of work. Edmund Phelps, a Nobel Prize winning economist, claims in his book Mass Flourishing: How Grassroots Innovation Created Jobs, Challenge, and Change that one of the virtues of capitalism is its ability to provide “the experience of mental stimulation, the challenge of new problems to solve, the chance to try the new, and the excitement of venturing into the unknown.”9 That is indeed a possibility under capitalism. But those subject to performance metrics are forced to focus their efforts on limited goals, imposed by others, who may not understand the work that they do. For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable. In short, the entrepreneurial element of human nature—which extends beyond the owners of enterprises—may be stifled by metric fixation.10 One result is to motivate those with greater initiative and enterprise to move out of mainstream, large-scale organizations where the culture of accountable performance prevails. Teachers move out of public schools to private schools and charter schools. Engineers move out of large corporations to boutique firms. Enterprising government employees become consultants. There is a healthy element in this. But surely the large-scale organizations of our society are the poorer for driving out those most likely to innovate and initiate. The more that work becomes a matter of filling in the boxes by which performance is to be measured and rewarded, the more it will repel those who think outside the box.

Thus, there is a gap between the measureable contribution and the actual, total contribution of the agent. As a result, measured performance (such as an increase in the division’s profits or a rise in the company’s stock price) may actually lead to the organization getting less of what it really needs from its employees. Moreover, there was an inevitable distortion of incentives created by the quest for simple, quantifiable standards by which to measure and reward performance

Promoting short-termism. Measured performance encourages what Robert K. Merton called “the imperious immediacy of interests … where the actor’s paramount concern with the foreseen immediate consequences excludes consideration of further or other consequences.”3 In short, advancing short-term goals at the expense of long-range considerations.

Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.

The Clinton administration downsized federal agencies and introduced market-based performance metrics as part of what it called “reinventing government.

Excellence in Statistics: Rigor Statisticians are specialists in coming to conclusions beyond your data safely—they are your best protection against fooling yourself in an uncertain world. To them, inferring something sloppily is a greater sin than leaving your mind a blank slate, so expect a good statistician to put the brakes on your exuberance. They care deeply about whether the methods applied are right for the problem and they agonize over which inferences are valid from the information at hand. The result? A perspective that helps leaders make important decisions in a risk-controlled manner. In other words, they use data to minimize the chance that you’ll come to an unwise conclusion. Excellence in Machine Learning: Performance You might be an applied machine-learning/AI engineer if your response to “I bet you couldn’t build a model that passes testing at 99.99999% accuracy” is “Watch me.” With the coding chops to build both prototypes and production systems that work and the stubborn resilience to fail every hour for several years if that’s what it takes, machine-learning specialists know that they won’t find the perfect solution in a textbook. Instead, they’ll be engaged in a marathon of trial and error. Having great intuition for how long it’ll take them to try each new option is a huge plus and is more valuable than an intimate knowledge of how the algorithms work (though it’s nice to have both). Performance means more than clearing a metric—it also means reliable, scalable, and easy-to-maintain models that perform well in production. Engineering excellence is a must. The result? A system that automates a tricky task well enough to pass your statistician’s strict testing bar and deliver the audacious performance a business leader demands. Wide Versus Deep What the previous two roles have in common is that they both provide high-effort solutions to specific problems. If the problems they tackle aren’t worth solving, you end up wasting their time and your money. A frequent lament among business leaders is, “Our data science group is useless.” And the problem usually lies in an absence of analytics expertise. Statisticians and machine-learning engineers are narrow-and-deep workers—the shape of a rabbit hole, incidentally—so it’s really important to point them at problems that deserve the effort. If your experts are carefully solving the wrong problems, your investment in data science will suffer low returns. To ensure that you can make good use of narrow-and-deep experts, you either need to be sure you already have the right problem or you need a wide-and-shallow approach to finding one.

It became quickly apparent that sales pipeline metrics have two distinct uses. The first intended use is to measure the health of the company looking into the future.

The second use of sales pipeline metrics is to measure the effectiveness of salespeople at moving opportunities through their sales cycles.

The objective of the Market Coverage sales metrics is to help make staffing and time allocation adjustments that will keep your sales force operating at peak productivity. There

1. Are the metrics you use supporting consistent and predictable achievement of your sales plan? Are they predictors of future performance?   2. What data could you use to develop double graph overlays to present the vitality of the sales force?   3. How useful would double graph overlays be for management review sessions?

Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers. Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products. By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website. Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.

Today’s boards don’t need chief marketing officers who have creative flair but no financial discipline.

As Procter & Gamble’s Chief Marketing Officer has said, “Marketing is a $450 billion industry, and we are making decisions with less data and discipline than we apply to $100,000 decisions in other aspects of our business.

one might make the case that managers have been coopted into the project of globalization and radical competition, which is supposedly brought about through constant change and innovation, as well as tighter and tighter scrutiny of the performance of staff measured against highly reductive metrics. This has affected both how managers are educated to do their jobs, their sense of professionalism and identity and what they find themselves involved in doing as managers. One of their principle roles is thought to be to champion innovation, by designing, implementing and supervising the necessary transformational changes that will guarantee competitive advantage.

many corporate boards lack the understanding to evaluate marketing strategies and expenditures. Most directors—and a rising percentage of Fortune 500 CEOs—lack deep experience in this field.

few managers appreciate the range of metrics by which they can evaluate marketing strategies and dynamics. Fewer still understand the pros, cons, and nuances of each.

Performance reviews, and their associated metrics, are another danger zone for innovations. Established companies don’t just want plans; they want managers to stick to those plans. They often reward people for doing what they committed to do and discourage them from making changes as circumstances warrant. At a large defense contractor, for instance, people got low marks for not delivering exactly what they had promised, even if they delivered something better—which led people to underpromise, eventually reducing employees’ aspirations and driving out innovation.

set up an innovative unit called First Community Bank (FCB), the first comprehensive banking initiative to focus on inner-city markets. FCB struggled to convince mainstream managers in Bank of Boston’s retail-banking group that the usual performance metrics, such as transaction time and profitability per customer, were not appropriate for this market—which required customer education, among other things—or for a new venture that still needed investment. Mainstream managers argued that “underperforming” branches should be closed. In order to save the innovation, FCB leaders had to invent their own metrics, based on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and find creative ways to show results by clusters of branches. The venture later proved both profitable and important to the parent bank as it embarked on a series of acquisitions.

The simple way to keep recruiting in everyone’s job description is to measure it. Count referrals and interviews. Measure how quickly people fill out interview feedback forms. Encourage employees to help with recruiting events, and track how often they do. Then make these metrics count when it comes to performance reviews and promotions. Recruiting is everyone’s job, so grade it that way.

Of course, to properly reward the “doers” you must correctly define what a doer is. This is central to the idea of execution. Simply put, a doer is a person who gets things done. Doing is meeting goals. Some goals are legitimately short-term goals that yield short-term results and are properly compensated on a short-term basis. But other goals are long-term and by definition we will not know if we have achieved those goals for some time. Consequently the people striving to meet those goals should be compensated on a long-term basis, with some portion of that long- term compensation based on achieving critical milestones toward the goal. And there are some goals that are so long- term that compensation should only be awarded when a person retires and his or her contributions to meeting those extremely long-term goals can be assessed. Leaders must take responsibility for setting the right rewards for doers. This is particularly true of boards of directors, many of which made egregiously bad calls in rewarding poor performance by the CEOs of their companies. Linked together as these behaviors are, rewarding the doers must be based on the correct metrics. For too long companies—and this often involved boards of directors— set “shareholder value” as one of the goals to be measured and rewarded in compensation plans. But the directors and CEOs who set shareholder value as a goal missed an essential point. Increasing shareholder value is an outcome, not a goal. If you set the right strategy with the right goals and execute well to implement the strategy and achieve the goals—growth in earnings per share, good cash flow, improved market share, for example—then shareholder value is the result. Get everything else right and shareholder value will take care of itself. EXPAND

Personal Thinking Blockchains More speculatively for the farther future, the notion of blockchain technology as the automated accounting ledger, the quantized-level tracking device, could be extensible to yet another category of record keeping and administration. There could be “personal thinking chains” as a life-logging storage and backup mechanism. The concept is “blockchain technology + in vivo personal connectome” to encode and make useful in a standardized compressed data format all of a person’s thinking. The data could be captured via intracortical recordings, consumer EEGs, brain/computer interfaces, cognitive nanorobots, and other methodologies. Thus, thinking could be instantiated in a blockchain — and really all of an individual’s subjective experience, possibly eventually consciousness, especially if it’s more precisely defined. After they’re on the blockchain, the various components could be administered and transacted — for example, in the case of a post-stroke memory restoration. Just as there has not been a good model with the appropriate privacy and reward systems that the blockchain offers for the public sharing of health data and quantified-self-tracking data, likewise there has not been a model or means of sharing mental performance data. In the case of mental performance data, there is even more stigma attached to sharing personal data, but these kinds of “life-streaming + blockchain technology” models could facilitate a number of ways to share data privately, safely, and remuneratively. As mentioned, in the vein of life logging, there could be personal thinking blockchains to capture and safely encode all of an individual’s mental performance, emotions, and subjective experiences onto the blockchain, at minimum for backup and to pass on to one’s heirs as a historical record. Personal mindfile blockchains could be like a next generation of Fitbit or Apple’s iHealth on the iPhone 6, which now automatically captures 200+ health metrics and sends them to the cloud for data aggregation and imputation into actionable recommendations. Similarly, personal thinking blockchains could be easily and securely recorded (assuming all of the usual privacy concerns with blockchain technology are addressed) and mental performance recommendations made to individuals through services such as Siri or Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, perhaps piped seamlessly through personal brain/computer interfaces and delivered as both conscious and unconscious suggestions. Again perhaps speculatively verging on science fiction, ultimately the whole of a society’s history might include not just a public records and document repository, and an Internet archive of all digital activity, but also the mindfiles of individuals. Mindfiles could include the recording of every “transaction” in the sense of capturing every thought and emotion of every entity, human and machine, encoding and archiving this activity into life-logging blockchains.

Nevertheless, in the field of second and foreign language teaching, behaviorist pedagogy—i.e., direct instruction in various forms—maintains a large following, which seems to grow ever larger in this era of high-stakes testing. The connection is obvious. When educators’ evaluations, pay, promotions, and job security depend on “metrics” of student performance, there is a natural tendency to teach to the test. Hence the proliferation of test-prep materials, paint-by-numbers teaching guides, and commercial learning systems, inevitably advertised as “research-based” and “aligned to the Common Core.

Business Processes Business processes are the operational activities performed by your organization, such as taking an order, processing an insurance claim, registering students for a class, or snapshotting every account each month. Business process events generate or capture performance metrics that translate into facts in a fact table. Most fact tables focus on the results of a single business process. Choosing the process is important because it defines a specific design target and allows the grain, dimensions, and facts to be declared. Each business process corresponds to a row in the enterprise data warehouse bus matrix.

Metrics are a tool for measuring success. Most organizations utilize fi nancials to determine performance.However, fi nancials are a backward (past view) and outcome - based look at performance. Financials will not provide insight into how well you are delivering on your promise currently

Scrum’s team-level velocity measure is not all that meaningful outside of the context of a particular team. Managers should never attempt to compare velocities of different teams or aggregate estimates across teams. Unfortunately, we have seen team velocity used as a measure to compare productivity between teams, a task for which it is neither designed nor suited. Such an approach may lead teams to “game” the metric, and even to stop collaborating effectively with each other.

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.

highly effective people invest little energy on their existing problem situations. Instead, they focus attention and energy on their desired outcomes or on what they want instead of these problems . . . A key to high performance across all these research contexts has been the ability to develop, articulate and stay focused on a compelling outcome. To note the difference between problems and possibilities, Penna and Phillips invite the following exercise. Think of a moderately serious problem at work or in your home. Pose and answer these questions: Why do you have this problem? What caused it? Who is to blame for it? What obstacles are there to solving it? Now take the same situation and answer these questions: What do you want instead of the problem? (Be sure to go beyond merely eliminating the problem.) What would it be like if the problem were solved? What would you see, hear and feel? Imagine the problem is solved. What has been gained?

What does this mean? It means that there is a statistical link to firm performance through the MCM component capabilities of selection, portfolio view, monitoring, and adaptive learning. That is, firms that have these processes in place have better market performance, brand equity, and customer equity relative to the market average.

There is an important implication here: just investing in technology for marketing does not lead to firm performance.

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.

high performers use a disciplined approach to solving problems. This is in contrast to the more common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can we convince everyone else that we didn’t cause the outage. When there is a culture of blame around outages and problems, groups may avoid documenting changes and displaying telemetry where everyone can see them to avoid being blamed for outages.

Prioritizing Your Email Roadmap Chances are you’ll need a Hail Mary. And a Net Promoter Score survey email. And a newsletter. And… And… And… If you are getting started with your email program, the list of emails you’ll need will probably be very long. Do you need to do everything at once? Definitely not. In fact, it’s best to start your program by aligning with business priorities and getting results before thinking about expanding. What areas are most troublesome in your business right now? What metric are you expected to move with email? Is it: Engagement? Retention? Conversion? Revenue? Signups? If none of those stick out above the rest, start from the top. Welcome and onboarding emails set the tone for product usage. Better onboarding and value communication lead to reductions in churn and disengagement down the road. Welcome and onboarding emails are also sent to most, if not all, of your users, thus they have a greater potential to influence user behaviors. At Highlights, for example, we set up a welcome email, five onboarding emails, and an upsell email the week before we launched the product. The goal was to maximize the number of people in a position to convert. It also allowed us to start getting some data to optimize performance. In general, you’ll want to prioritize emails that: send a lot (large volume of sends); send consistently (every day, or every week at least); and have the potential to have a big impact on a key business goal. In the beginning especially, you want to make sure that you have a clear goal or metric to monitor with the aim of evaluating performance with user data. Start implementing a first sequence, test, gather data, and move on to the next sequence.

Controls are the mechanisms that you use to align with other leaders you work with, and they can range from defining metrics to sprint planning (although I wouldn’t recommend the latter). There is no universal set of controls—depending on the size of team and your relationships with its leaders, you’ll want to mix and match—but the controls structure itself is universally applicable. Some of the most common controls that I’ve seen and used: Metrics26 align on outcomes while leaving flexibility around how the outcomes are achieved. Visions27 ensure that you agree on long-term direction while preserving short-term flexibility. Strategies28 confirm you have a shared understanding of the current constraints and how to address them. Organization design allows you to coordinate the evolution of a wider organization within the context of sub-organizations. Head count and transfers are the ultimate form of prioritization, and a good forum for validating how organizational priorities align across individual teams. Roadmaps align on problem selection and solution validation. Performance reviews coordinate culture and recognition. Etc. There are an infinite number of other possibilities, many of which are specific to your company’s particular meetings and forums. Start with this list, but don’t stick to it!

Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 With the worldwide shift towards feasible energy sources, the sunlight based charger producing industry in Bangalore has seen critical development and advancement lately. As a conspicuous player in this market, SuneaseSolar has arisen as a main producer, offering state of the art advancements and answers for satisfy the rising need for environmentally friendly power arrangements. This article investigates the scene of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore , digs into the vital elements and advances given by SuneaseSolar, and features the maintainability advantages of sunlight powered chargers. Moreover, it grandstands the upsides of picking SuneaseSolar for sunlight based charger arrangements, presents client tributes, and talks about future patterns and advancements molding the Bangalore sun powered charger market. 1. An Overview of solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, also known as India's Silicon Valley, is also making a name for itself in the solar energy industry. The city's energetic tech culture and obligation to maintainability have made ready for a developing sun powered charger fabricating industry. Significance of Sun powered chargers in India's Energy Scene Sun powered chargers assume an essential part in India's shift towards sustainable power sources. With its plentiful daylight, India can possibly outfit sunlight based power for an enormous scope, decreasing reliance on non-renewable energy sources and moderating environmental change. 2. Outline of SuneaseSolar as a Main Maker Organization Foundation and History SuneaseSolar has arisen as an unmistakable player in Bangalore's sun powered charger fabricating scene. With an emphasis on development and quality, the organization has gained notoriety for conveying dependable and productive sunlight based arrangements. Scope of Sunlight powered charger Items Advertised SuneaseSolar offers a different scope of sunlight based charger items custom-made to meet different energy needs. From private roof frameworks to enormous scope business establishments, they take special care of a wide range of clients. 3. Key Highlights and Innovations Presented by SuneaseSolar High level Sunlight powered charger Plans and Materials SuneaseSolar values utilizing state of the art plans and materials to upgrade the proficiency and solidness of their sun powered chargers. By remaining on the ball, they guarantee clients get first class items that go the distance. Metrics for Efficiency and Performance When it comes to solar panels, efficiency is absolutely necessary. SuneaseSolar focuses on execution measurements to ensure ideal energy creation and cost reserve funds for their clients. With a sharp spotlight on result and dependability, they endeavor to expand the advantages of sun oriented power. 4. Maintainability and Ecological Effect of Sunlight based chargers Job of Sun powered Energy in Lessening Carbon Impression Sun powered energy assumes a urgent part in bringing down fossil fuel byproducts and battling environmental change. By bridling the force of the sun, sun powered chargers offer a perfect and manageable option in contrast to conventional energy sources, adding to a greener future. Reusing and Removal Practices for Sunlight powered chargers To address worries about the finish of-life pattern of sunlight powered chargers, SuneaseSolar carries out reusing and removal practices to limit natural effect. By advancing dependable waste administration, they guarantee that sun powered energy stays a genuinely economical answer for the long run. 5. Cost-Effectiveness and Return on Investment of SuneaseSolar's Solar Panel Solutions When it comes to solar panel manufacturers in Bangalore, SuneaseSolar shines brightly like a diamond.

Evaluating Prompt Performance: Measuring the success of your prompts is vital; to do that, you need to establish clear evaluation criteria and performance metrics. Consider factors like the relevance and coherence of the generated output, the accuracy of the information provided, and how satisfied you are with the results. When you assess the prompt performance quantitatively and qualitatively, you can pinpoint areas for improvement and further refine your prompt engineering process.

In the case a bricklayer working for a subcontractor on the Perth Stadium construction project suffered serious injuries when he single-handedly began to remove two overhead steel purlins that were in the way when he was building a wall. One of the discussions in the case was the extent to which the principal should have provided training to the subcontractor about workplace health and safety hazards associated with the work. In that context, the court observed: Pursuant to its contract, NeoWest had autonomy in how it was to complete the works and it was the appropriate body to provide the training and induction within its specialised area and to specify the methods to be used in performing the tasks required of its workers. It would not have been reasonably practicable, or indeed wise, for the first defendant to impinge on NeoWest's training and induction of its own employees as to the proper and safe method of completing the works within its scope of works and area of expertise and specialised knowledge, possibly to override or even contradict that training and induction. Each individual trade's expertise and specialist knowledge was the very reason why the first defendant engaged subcontractors to perform the various works in the first place, rather than complete them itself.60 This limited (although still very onerous) obligation is consistent with a social approach to managing wicked problems. As I argue later in the book, you cannot solve wicked problems – we cannot solve safety. All we can do is “tame” the problem of safety – do the best we can.

You don’t need to measure everything. In fact, focusing on too many numbers tends to do more harm than good. So, let me challenge you, even if you have a dashboard in your company, to simplify. Let’s set the goal to identify 5–7 key metrics that measure the performance of your CCF.

Procurement, though, cannot move to a high achieving team acting alone, but if the will, desire, drive and commitment are there, it will succeed. It will require passionate and committed leadership. What this book describes and provides readers is how to progress to this aspiration and subscribe to the following value proposition, “Procurement is the key and respected organisation resource that secures goods, services and materials to the organisation aligned with key business performance metrics, strategic objectives, priorities and values. It is the primary commercial team in the business.

P&G switched from market TSR to operating TSR. Operating TSR is an amalgamated measure of three real operating performance measures—sales growth, profit margin improvement, and increase in capital efficiency. This measure more accurately captures P&G’s true performance across the most critical operational metrics and, moreover, measures things that business-unit presidents and general managers can actually influence, unlike the market-based TSR number. The operating TSR measure integrates revenue growth, margin growth, and cash productivity and it does so regardless of the type of assets being managed—whether you have hard assets like tissue/towel paper converting machines or inventory like cosmetics and fragrance products. In other words, the measure could be equitably and usefully applied to all of P&G’s diverse businesses. And it isn’t utterly unconnected to stock performance—there is a high correlation over the medium and long term between operating TSR and market TSR. But unlike the stock price, the operating TSR measures are ones over which P&G managers have real influence in the short and medium term.

and Sweet I followed Marc on Twitter well before we met in person. Here are a few of my favorite tweets of his, many related to the above points: “My goal is not to fail fast. My goal is to succeed over the long run. They are not the same thing.” “To do original work: It’s not necessary to know something nobody else knows. It is necessary to believe something few other people believe.” “Andy Grove had the answer: For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses adverse consequences of the first metric.

To become more aware of this behavioral tendency, we need to observe and acknowledge how sustainable performance is rewarded; find out what are the consistency of practices and how real is the dimension of organizational values against its daily operations?

Keep metrics simple and actionable.

HR Metrics are the smartest way to make your HR practices effective and efficient.

All metrics are not for everyone.

Unveiling London E-commerce Triumph: Decoding Data with WooCommerce Analytics In the bustling realm of London e-commerce, navigating the digital landscape requires not just intuition but informed decision-making backed by data. This is where the marriage of WooCommerce and analytics becomes a game-changer. In this exploration, we delve into the nuances of leveraging WooCommerce Analytics for e-commerce success in London. As we embark on this journey, the expertise of a dedicated woocommerce development in london adds a unique perspective, unraveling the potential of data decoding in the heart of the e-commerce landscape. Understanding the London E-commerce Scene This section emphasizes the importance of understanding the unique characteristics of the London e-commerce landscape. It underscores the need for businesses to be attuned to local market trends, consumer preferences, and the digital sophistication of the London audience to effectively leverage WooCommerce Analytics. The Role of WooCommerce Agency in London E-commerce Analytics 1. Proactive Data Strategy: Setting the Foundation This point explains the proactive role of a WooCommerce agency in London in establishing a robust data strategy. It involves setting up analytics tools, defining KPIs, and aligning data collection with the specific goals of London e-commerce businesses. 2. Tailoring Analytics to London Market Trends Here, the focus is on tailoring analytics solutions to capture and interpret data that is directly relevant to the ever-evolving market trends of London. A WooCommerce agency in London customizes analytics approaches to provide actionable insights for businesses in the local market. Key Metrics and KPIs for London E-commerce Success 3. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO): Turning Clicks into Transactions This point explores the pivotal role of Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) in London e-commerce. It delves into how a WooCommerce agency in London optimizes the conversion rate by refining the checkout process, analyzing user journeys, and enhancing the overall user experience to maximize sales. 4. Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Fostering Long-Term Relationships The focus here is on the importance of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) analytics. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London helps businesses identify high-value customers, tailor marketing strategies, and foster long-term relationships for sustained success. WooCommerce Analytics Tools and Implementations 5. Google Analytics Integration for Comprehensive Insights This point delves into the integration of Google Analytics with WooCommerce. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London guides businesses through the integration process, utilizing Google Analytics to gain comprehensive insights into user behavior, traffic sources, and website performance. 6. Custom Reports and Dashboards: Tailoring Insights for London Businesses Here, the emphasis is on the creation of custom reports and dashboards by a WooCommerce agency in London. These tailored insights provide businesses with specific information relevant to their products, target audience, and market trends, enhancing decision-making accuracy. Analyzing User Behavior for Enhanced User Experience 7. Heatmaps and User Flow Analysis: Optimizing the Customer Journey This point explores the use of heatmaps and user flow analysis to optimize the customer journey in London e-commerce. A WooCommerce agency in London employs these tools to uncover patterns, identify bottlenecks, and make strategic adjustments for a seamless user experience. 8. Abandoned Cart Analysis: Recovering Lost Opportunities This section discusses the significance of abandoned cart analysis. It explains how a WooCommerce agency in London utilizes analytics to understand the reasons behind cart abandonment and implements targeted strategies to recover potentially lost sales through personalized retargeting campaigns.

If your product trio is already negotiating outcomes with your product leader, congratulations! However, remember to keep these tips in mind as you set outcomes with your leader: Is your team being tasked with a product outcome and not a business outcome or a traction metric? If you are being tasked with a traction metric, is the metric well known? Have you already confirmed that your customers want to exhibit the behavior being tracked? If it’s the first time you are working on a new metric, are you starting with a learning goal (e.g., discover the relevant opportunities) before committing to a challenging performance goal?

Nor, according to the Dutch experts, did the publication of metrics affect patient behavior in choosing a provider or hospital. Their conclusion: “The small body of evidence available provides no consistent evidence that the public release of performance data changes consumer behavior or improves care.

Berwick captured this brilliantly in his article, “The Toxicity of Pay for Performance”: “Pay for performance” reduces intrinsic motivation. Many tasks, especially in health care, are potentially intrinsically satisfying. Relieving pain, answering questions, exercising manual dexterity, being confided in, working on a professional team, solving puzzles, and experiencing the role of a trusted authority—these are not at all bad ways to spend part of one’s day at work. Pride and joy in the work of caring is among the many motivations that do result in “performance” among health care professionals. In the rancorous debates about compensation, fees, and reimbursement that so occupy the time of health care leaders and clinicians today, it is all too easy to neglect, or even to doubt, the fact that nonfinancial and intrinsic rewards are important in the work of medical care. Unfortunately, neglecting intrinsic satisfiers in work can inadvertently diminish them.

serious crimes such as robbery were downgraded to “theft snatch,” and rapes were often underreported so as to hit performance targets. As a retired detective chief superintendent put it, “When targets are set by offices such as the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime, what they think they are asking for are 20% fewer victims. That translates into ‘record 20% fewer crimes’ as far as … senior officers are concerned.

we try to develop performance metrics for any complex environment or organization that is either unique or substantially different from other environments or organizations, standardized measures of performance will be inaccurate and deceptive. Yet the desire to create performance metrics that are “transparent” in the interests of “accountability” usually translates into using metrics that are standardized and centralized, since such metrics are more easily grasped by superiors and by publics far from the field of operations

The cases of Mylan and Wells Fargo are recent examples of an older and common pattern, by which policies of payment for measured performance lead employees to engage in actions that create long-run damage to a firm’s reputation.

A focus on measurable performance indicators can lead managers to neglect tasks for which no clear measures of performance are available, as the organizational scholars Nelson Repenning and Rebecca Henderson have recently noted.25 Unable to count intangible assets such as reputation, employee satisfaction, motivation, loyalty, trust, and cooperation, those enamored of performance metrics squeeze assets in the short term at the expense of long-term consequences. For all these reasons, reliance upon measurable metrics is conducive to short-termism, a besetting malady of contemporary American corporations.

Performance metrics as a measure of accountability help to allocate blame when things go badly, but do little to encourage success,28 especially when success requires imagination, innovation, and risk. Indeed, as the economist Frank Knight noted almost a century ago, entrepreneurship entails “immeasurable uncertainty,” which is not susceptible to metric calculation.

3.  How useful are more metrics? Remember that measured performance, when useful, is more effective in identifying outliers, especially poor performers or true misconduct. It is likely to be less useful in distinguishing between those in the middle or near the top of the ladder of performance. Plus, the more you measure, the greater the likelihood that the marginal costs of measuring will exceed the benefits. So, the fact that metrics is helpful doesn’t mean that more metrics is more helpful.

Units: How your direct reports are grouped, such as by function, product, or geographical area Reporting relationships and integration mechanisms: How lines of reporting and accountability are set up to coordinate effort, and how work among units is integrated Decision rights and rules: Who is empowered to make what kinds of decisions, and what rules should be applied to align decisions with strategy Performance measurement and incentive systems: The performance-evaluation metrics and incentive systems that are in place

Every Monday morning at Nest, that’s how my management meetings started: Who are the great people we want to hire? Are we making our hiring goals or retention metrics? If not, what’s the problem? What are the roadblocks? And how is the team doing? What issues do people have? How are performance reviews going? Who needs a bonus? How are we going to celebrate these accomplishments so the team feels valued? And, most importantly, are people leaving?

Many companies create their own metrics to map business metrics to ML metrics. For example, Netflix measures the performance of their recommender system using take-rate: the number of quality plays divided by the number of recommendations a user sees.4 The higher the take-rate, the better the recommender system. Netflix also put a recommender system’s take-rate in the context of their other business metrics like total streaming hours and subscription cancellation rate. They found that a higher take-rate also results in higher total streaming hours and lower subscription cancellation rates.5

This insight prompted Lafley to switch the bonus metric from TSR to something called operating TSR, which is based on a combination of three real operating performance measures—sales growth, profit margin improvement, and increase in capital efficiency. His belief was that if P&G satisfied its customers, operating TSR would increase, and the stock price would take care of itself over the long term. Moreover, operating TSR is a number that P&G’s business unit presidents can truly influence, unlike the market-based TSR number.