Performance Measurement

Unless your performance reports are focused on answering three critical questions, they're likely to bore you sleep, lead you astray, or confuse the begeesus out of you.

The election result this week in Alberta, Canada confounded a lot of people and cast the art of polling in a bad light.   The polls  predicted  that the Wildrose Party would win, but they were trounced by the PC Party.  Two days before the election, one poll gave the Wildrose 38% versus the PCs 36%. For the previous week the polls averaged 41% for the Wildrose and 33% for the PCs, a lead of 8%.  In the actual election results the winning Progressive Conservative Party had 44% to the Wildrose’s 34%, a loss for Wildrose by about 10%

Here is a vision statement to help sell your performance management initiative to your executives:
“Within 12 months, every employee will be able to check their email, calendar and their personal top 10 KPIs at the breakfast table using their smartphone or tablet.”

Vision and mission statements these days have reduced to a pedestrian, cliched, insipid product of jumping through strategic planning hoops. They've lost the ability to unite masses of people for a shared cause and imbued more cynicism into workforces. Ironically, the main reason that people will refuse to measure their vision or mission is the claim that they are deliberately broad for aspirational purposes and deliberately vague so everyone can find their own meaning in them. Being broad and vague means being immeasurable. Can you even tell which type of company the following mission statements belong to, let alone how to measure them?

The Economist magazine is taking a jab at another sort of inflation. Women’s pant sizes, while nominally the same, have actually been increasing in girth.  The British new magazine estimates that an average size 14 pair of women’s pants  “is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s.”

Facebook sent out a message the other day on its new way of counting “check-ins” to improve accuracy. The result of the increased “accuracy” will be a drop in the number of check-ins.  The message said: