Weasel words are words that have no specific and obvious and singular meaning. They bring no clear images to mind of what is meant. Words like: effective, sustainable, harnessed, connectedness and leveraged. Weasel words have a stupifying effect on people's understanding of goals that are written with them, as well as rendering...

People agree they should measure performance. But they just don't get around to doing it. They say they don't have time, don't have money, don't have support, have too much else to do. If things are going to change, we need a different approach to engaging people to measure what matters.

Is the core assumption of pay-for-performance, that we can isolate the contribution of individuals on outcomes, correct? Here are five challenges that need to be met, and met well, before pay-based reward and punishment should even be considered.

Subscriber Nia B. asks: "We need to establish a measure for safety, however we have a terrific safety record and insufficient data to establish one. Is there a meaningful way to measure this?"

There are three reasons why people will give time to things. Apply these reasons to measurement, and more people will give time to measuring, too. (more…)

We have lots of reasons not to measure performance: not enough time, not enough good data, not enough engagement from colleagues, not enough support from leaders, not enough clarity in our goals, not the right timing, and so on. These are all constraints. But they shouldn't be showstoppers.

Rhianna's organisation has a committee for their new KPI Reporting Framework project. And they've laid out an approach to consult the right people in developing new measures to align to their six strategic themes. Deadlines are set, senior leaders are supportive, the budget is approved. But chances are, they'll fail.

5 Stars -- My go-to resource for performance report design Okay, I'll admit that I haven't read "Show Me The Numbers" from cover to cover, even though I've owned a copy (a signed copy!) for a few years. But it's not the kind of book that requires this to get the value from it.

5 Stars -- Save millions of dollars by reading this book first... Over my many years as a performance measurement specialist, I've worked with quite a few organisations who built performance dashboards that cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars to design, tailor, populate and launch, and got very little value from the investment.

4 Stars -- Interpreting data is about the patterns, not the points This is not a book for people looking for the technical detail of data analysis or statistical process control. The pearl in this book is the message that interpreting your data (such as KPIs or performance measures) is about looking at patterns, not at individual points. It's a book that can...