One objection to measuring performance with KPIs is that we don't need them; we can already see what's going on by walking around, by our past experience, by our wise intuition, by what people complain about. But our human limitations make these observations inherently biased.

Seth Godin wrote a great little piece called Show Your Work,about why we should show people our work before it's done, before it's perfect, before it's ready. This invites their collaboration, and better work is the result. Do you do that when you work on KPIs?

Now that makes it easy, doesn't it? Someone has put together a list of the 20 best KPIs for your business. Saves you the time of trying to figure it out for yourself, yes? But does it really save time in monitoring performance?

Robert, a Measure Up subscriber, asked how can you demonstrate results when your job is to make sure something doesn't happen. He's basically asking how can you measure what you want to prevent? ...

The only way we can get performance to improve is to have some quantifiable influence over it. But some areas of performance are so chaotic that any improvement we try to make is swallowed up by the chaos, and we can't quantify (or even see) the change we've made.

Great strategy execution should be about implementing high return-on-investment (ROI) improvement initiatives. But finding that high ROI requires a few mindset shifts about what leverage really means, about the role of data in helping us find leverage, and about where to act to implement leverage.

It's easy to default to the first quantification method that comes to mind when we're designing a measure. But the default isn't always the best choice. Here are some considerations to make a more deliberate decision about whether a measure should be a count, a percentage, or an average.

Our definition of accountability for KPIs, or accountability for performance, profoundly affects people's ownership of performance. This new accountability definition creates ownership...

"Business decisions, as many of our colleagues in business and your own experience can attest, are frequently based on hope or fear, what others seem to be doing, what senior leaders have done and believe has worked in the past, and their dearly held ideologies - in short, on lots of things other than the facts... If doctors practiced medicine the way many companies practice management, there w...

My interview with Donald Wheeler is a very practical exploration of how we can better interpret signals from our performance measures and KPI's. (more&hel...