Management guru Peter Drucker is quoted over and again for his message that the key to strategy is omission. Good strategy is ruthlessly about what not to do, than it is about what to do. The same goes for KPIs. We must be ruthless about what to measure.

Nijntje, or Miffy as she is known in English-speaking countries, is the little rabbit character who is drawn with only a few simple lines and primary colours. Yet she's meaningfully recognisable as a little rabbit. She doesn't need any more detail to be meaningful. But any less detail and she looks incomplete. Goals that are meaningfully measurable are just like Nijntje.

The step in your performance measurement process at which you set targets has a critical impact on how sensible and achievable those targets will turn out to be. (more…)

A post from Guest author Louise Watson, licensed PuMP Consultant from Adura Strategy. I'm working in the Middle East with two Canadian companies with operations in Qatar, and I have been thinking about how the work I am doing with them has really put a spotlight on how the PuMP® Performance Measurement Blueprint can ...

Most organisations do measure performance, even if it's only financial results. But the world over, there is a rapidly growing demand for better quality performance measures of non-financial results. Despite the demand, few organisations are doing it well. The biggest reason is their failure to invest appropriately in their performance measurement approach.

To make useful progress with KPIs, we have to get over our obsession with getting it right, doing it perfectly and waiting for all all the planets line up before we get started. We’d be waiting for ever. And one way to get over these types of procrastination is simply to start where the energy is.

Forget all the cliches about why we measure performance. 'You can't manage what you don't measure.' 'What you measure is what you get.' Why we measure performance is much more profound and fundamental.

Evidence-based leadership is not about how to lead. It's about what to give your attention to as you lead, and what you're leading your organisation to. It's not about how to communicate or inspire or direct or engage. It's about how to use all these attributes to lead your organisation to high-performance.

Problem: You have to sit down with your team, and work out your performance measures. You want it to be collaborative and fruitful, but you're dreading it because in the past it's generally been cumbersome and futile. Solution: You have to do something different.

We put so much effort into developing our performance measures (aka KPIs). It seems only natural to want them to be relevant and useful for a long time, to get the return on the effort we invested into their conception and implementation. So what is the ideal lifespan of a performance measure?