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.