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This is my own drawing for the Kids Book, ‘Unlikely Friends’. www.goodbaby.band/kidsbook
This is another post from an old word file I just found , so I’m publishsing.
Jeff Wilke, former CEO of Amazon’s consumer business says that metrics are how leaders inspect and scale the mental model of their businesses. His thoughts always seem to be both simple and profound. I like to expound on this to say that metrics are not only a tool of the business, they are the business.
Metrics are the quantitative manifestation of an actual person’s decision making. Even if robots and AI perform our critical business functions there is a human being responsible for the output. Metrics are not separate from the work. They are the work.
So when we ask who owns a particular metric the answer is: who’s behavior determines the outcome?
Johnsonville Sausage is one particular case study that has stuck with me from b-school[2]. I don’t remember the particulars but the gist was that customers were calling up with complaints about the sausages. They started routing the calls to the factory floor where the foreman would pick up, hear the issues and then fix them. I’m mangling the details but the point stuck – there were no middlemen[3]. The foreman owned the outputs of their work and the sausages obtained maximum deliciousness. There’s a reason this became a case study.
A large value of having metrics is the ability to change future behavior. If the actual person influencing the behavior is not involved then a metric might only serve as a history report.
In football the referees call the game. Our tendency is to yell when somebody else blows the whistle. Metrics should be more like a gentleman’s tennis match; we must call our own lines.
That said, some of the most valuable work I’ve ever done in finance is develop metrics. Plugging a missing metrics gap is often the most valuable thing one can do for a business. Have I developed metrics for activities I didn’t ‘own’? Definitely.
It takes effort. Good metrics are not free. They are an investment.
End Notes:
[2] https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/pages/item.aspx?num=10937
[3] By the way, their telephone number is 1-888-556-BRAT, no joke! http://www.johnsonville.com/contact.html
Have some thoughts? Feel free to drop a comment or hit me up: charlie@charleskunken.com
Other Posts In The Hollywood Heist Series
A good input metric is one that enables us to monitor and change our behavior. It should have the following characteristics: (1) Focus – it measures one thing; (2) Ownership –a specific person is accountable for its performance and accuracy of the measurement; (3) Benchmark – there is a target which informs whether or not performance is satisfactory.