In NASCAR racing, you might be forgiven for thinking that a speedometer is a very important gauge for the driver. After all, racing is about speed, right? And speed should therefore be measured. But ironically, NASCAR drivers don't use a speedometer at all.

Guest author Martin Klubeck, author of Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results, reminds us just how easy it is to fall into the trap of making our measures the end goal, and why we must make sure we stay connected with our intended results.

One of my performance measures is Measure Up Unsubscribe Rate, the proportion of readers who unsubscribe from this newsletter. Sometimes it's what I write about that makes them unsubscribe. And that can make the Measure Up Unsubscribe Rate will spike up. Should I worry about this?

One mistake organisations make in performance measurement is to not have a real KPI methodology. They treat measuring performance as an ad hoc activity or event. But when you do adopt a performance measurement methodology, another mistake is to do too ...