As a thought leader with a message that I desperately want to share with the world, reaching out to as many people as possible is critical to success. No point shouting from the rooftops "hey everyone, measure what matters!" because few people pay attention to rooftops, actually. I have to find other ways to reach out, but I've been failing...

Robert D. Behn is a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, and a passionate advocate for public sector performance. His regular Performance Leadership Report is always succinct and salient. His definition of performance management, versus performance measurement, clearly puts the responsibility on leade...

One mistake organisations make in performance measurement is to not have a real KPI methodology. They treat measuring performance as an ad hoc activity or event. But when you do adopt a performance measurement methodology, another mistake is to do too ...

The best and most meaningful performance measure in the world can be rendered utterly useless if no one is clear about who should interpret and use it. (more…)

Using a social process is a very natural way to engage people in measurement, and it works so much better than presentations and meetings. That's the topic of this Harvard ManageMentor video with Stacey Barr.

Certainly one of the biggest objections to measuring performance is the amount of time and effort it takes to do it properly. Executives, managers and staff alike somehow believe that it should be fast and easy, a trivial task they can just 'get out of the way' and go back to their 'real work'. It's because they believe in the same BIG lie.

Much of the time and effort that goes into measuring performance is rework. We rethink why we're measuring, we rethink what we're measuring, and we rethink how we're measuring. Sometimes this rethinking is important. But most of the time it's complete waste.

Whether you're measuring hard facts like sales and revenue and cycle time, or softer perceptions like satisfaction and agreement, those measures need to be scientific. Here's why.

"You'll get square eyes!" my mother used to warn me when I was a child, and she thought I was watching too much TV. It's not true, but it is true that what we look at most does certainly influence our sight. How is our sight influenced by looking at short-term targets?

Guest Post by Bryan Hansen While working through the implications of an assignment I was given by my employer to awaken a deeply hibernating employee review process, I began to experience a bit of a gestalt and used this mind map to help me keep all the plates spinning while I continued to follow some important rabbit trails.