This morning I started considering a scary thought that perhaps I have been chasing the wrong sort of measures my whole life. I have a sense of what is important and I consider my progress by what I measure. I have set out on my 365 list to consider how I am going to measure success, and what exactly I should be measuring.
After some searching, I landed on watching a speech by Clayton Christensen. He was speaking on one of this favorite topics – that of the disrupting innovations that cause growth in an industry. At the end of the talk, someone from the audience asked a question that led him down the path of discussing this concept of measuring a business.
It is his opinion that finance people have been learning metrics for evaluating success that are all together wrong. Effectively he concluded that people are doing the wrong things for the right reasons. This is because we have been taught ratios for measuring success that lead toward conclusions about what do to with our resources. He believes that those measures have produced the opposite of their intention. Slow or no growth due to lack of innovation.
The measuring of a business parallels the measuring of your personal life in remarkable ways. Apparently, Clayton Christensen thought so to which is why he wrote a book on “How Will You Measure Your Life.” A solid primer on this is the blog he first wrote on the topic at the Harvard Business Review. See that Article Here.
I can probably break the entire point down to the concept of learning to measure the activities that will produce long lasting important results that you actually will value. Short term achievements, although attractive may not be the correct measure to be pursuing. I can be really happy about the title promotion or a the logo on the new car I am driving but at the end of the day if my family and personal life is a complete failure then what have I really achieved?
Guy Reams (107)
365 Member
