Measurement is the most practical way to create a performance culture that is capable of taking the journey to become a high-performance organisation. But it won't work quickly enough, or nearly as well, if it doesn't start with the senior leadership team.

These are soft and subjective things... love, loyalty, trust, satisfaction, engagement, commitment, pride. They are feelings that people have toward other things, like our products or services or brand. So it's tempting to want a performance measure of these things, as evidence of our success. But I'm not so sure we should bother...

Over the past 10 years of Measure Up's life, over 13,000 subscribers have shared their biggest KPI questions with me. Almost 90% of all those questions come down to a core set of 11 questions. Only one of these is the right question to answer first.

Strategy execution more often than not feels like work, rather than true execution. Sometimes it feels like rework, when we keep redesigning it. Other times it feels like guesswork, implementing without really knowing if it’s working. And then there are times when it’s just plain hard work to get anything to happen. What we want is smooth execution to take the place of the work.