Counting in a business is easy and addictive. Some companies just can't find enough things to measure. It's like watching someone paint their body with random tattoos; where do they stop? Look at this dashboard of an online business management program:
In their fascinating book, Scorecasting, Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz describe the danger of reckless counting. They reference the blocked shots by NBA centers as an example. In 2008 Dwight Howard, center for the Orlando Magic, blocked 232 shots in the regular season. That same year Tim Duncan, the San Antonio Spurs big man, blocked 149 shots. Howard easily won the NBA Defensive Player of the Year and was assigned the nom de guerre of Superman. Moskowitz and Wertheim drilled deeper on the "value" of those blocked shots, i.e. the resulting points that each block generated for the team. While Howard's blocks generated .53 points per game; Duncan produced 1.12 points per block.
That triggers a question: Why do we—and the NBA—count blocks rather than value blocks? The short answer: Counting is easy; measuring value is hard. We see this all the time in many facets of life and business. People count quantities (easy) rather than measure importance (hard) and as a result sometimes make faulty decisions...Business, like Sports, is filled with rankings based on simple numbers that don’t always correspond to value.
Moskowitz and Wertheim, Sportscasting
So how do you measure importance? How do you choose the right things to value, so that your team makes good decisions and gets the right things done? How do you shrink your dashboard in size from the one above to this:
6 Steps to Track Importance
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Get radically objective about the business
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Set a clear direction by focusing on a handful of priorities
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Track the things that best portray performance on priorities
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Align the team through routine communication
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Keep score to hold each other accountable
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Adapt and learn quickly
I'll deep-dive on these steps in separate posts. Until then, quit counting and start tracking importance. Get the team focused on the right things; and make sure you know the value of a "blocked shot" before you tattoo it on your dashboard.
