If you're stuck for what to start measuring, there is one category of performance that is important to every organisation or business in every sector, industry and country. It's waste, in all its forms. Which of the four categories matters most to you right now?

Back in the 1990s process thinking was all the rage. Organisations world-wide were identifying their core business processes, mapping and flowcharting and doing Six Sigma and Lean and BPR to ramp up business performance. Was it just a fad?

Do you have KPIs or measures that are lurking lifelessly and in large numbers in your performance reports? No-one ever goes near them, and they refuse to die despite all the usual arguments to get rid of them. You have Zombie KPIs.

We slice, we dice, we tabulate, we chart, we dashboard and then we draw conclusions. But how often have we drawn diabolically incorrect conclusions because we have violated the two basic principles of understanding our measures?

Can you prove that measuring and monitoring people's performance actually does improve the performance of the organisation? I'll be you can't. A very fundamental dynamic prevents it.

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.

You'll get better quality measures when you start to deliberately choose the best way to quantify your measures. It's too easy to default to counts and percentages. Instead, learn these five basic quantification formulae so you can make better choices in the future.

4 Stars -- Practical performance measurement wisdom from the trenches... Marty Klubeck's fresh and practical perspective on how to measure what matters fills a gap in the performance measurement literature. It's the most important gap to fill: the how-to and step-by-step details of how to decide what is important to measure, what the measures should be, and how to use those me...

Some people love targets and many people hate them. They will avoid locking in targets, they will set them low enough to be within their known capability, and they will make excuses about why they don't reach them. Hardly the kind of behaviour that drives performance improvement.

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.