Do You Manage the Metrics or Does the Metrics Manage You?

Metrics are an important method of understanding what is happening in your business at any particular time. It provides a feedback loop that helps executives make decisions about business strategy. Even though metrics are important, it is equally important to understand that metrics don’t tell the whole story as one can become derailed by over-reliance on metrics.

You need to know how many products are being made, rejection rate, overtime, staffing numbers, sales volume, stock value, time spent on activities, and customer perception. These metrics, in addition to the thousands of others, help describe how a business is functioning. It is possible to run some metrics by the day, month, quarter, year, or decade to get a better grasp of what is going on.

Metrics can also influence employee performance in positive ways by letting employees know that their contributions count. It provides a level of feedback and expectation building that is used for evaluating employee performance. The numbers help motivate and define the nature of work.

The downside is that numbers take on more importance than the actual work and organizational output. This occurs when metrics take on a life of their own and become the focus of employees who want to seek praise and rewards without actually servicing the needs of the company. The focus switches from the customer to the numbers.

The consequences of switching from real life customers or outputs to numbers are that the numbers become the main focus of operations. It is possible to meet all of the numbers but still be turning away customers or turning out an inferior product.  If your business is not measuring properly then the numbers become a type of smoke and mirrors to what is actually happening.

Metrics should be used to create a full picture but also should not supplant common sense in managing entire process. If the numbers take on a life of their own organizational targets may not be hit even though the metrics are giving positive results. Adjusting and changing the metrics from time-to-time can ensure people don’t only focus on the numbers.

Trees or Forest-Manager or Executive?

Seeing the trees or the forest is a good indication of the caliber of the person you might be assessing for future positions of authority. Everything exists within something else greater. A tree exists in a forest in the same way as your finger is part of your hand or a feather is part of a bird.  The level of thinking is based on how much a person sees in any particular situation. In business this seeing leads to all types of strategic improvements.

The first thing we should understand is that seeing is based in differentiation. Differentiation is the ability to compare and contrast at least two things to better understand them. An experienced eye can see much more than an inexperienced one in the comparison process. This is one of the reasons why more knowledgeable people guide less knowledgeable people to higher forms of understanding.

Two people can look at the same thing and see different things. For example, a manager may focus on their daily functions while an executive focuses more on the bigger picture. When a person can see the trees and understand how they fit within the forest they are able to create better strategic plans.

If a candidate can only see the trees and does not have the systems thinking skills to see the forest they will never make a good executive. The big idea is built from the experience with the small ideas and only a few people will be able to make a leap to connecting the trees together into a system.

It is this systematic thinking that allows a person to manipulate an entire forest to ensure that it works at its optimum. They understand which trees, in what arrangement, make up the foundations of the root system and which trees are expanding that root system. Diseased trees are nursed to health or removed from the system.

Success of organizations requires selecting, recruiting and grooming future managers and executives to positions in which they mentally qualify. Not every manager will make a great executive just in the same way as not every employee should be a manager no matter how well they perform their daily function.

Critical Thinking among Business Graduates

Critical thinking is the art of understanding that delves into the alternatives to generate the most feasible answers. Business students should learn the art of focus and thinking to make better decisions that impact operations. At times we become subject to our own way of viewing the world and it is necessary to break the mold to discover something new. Critical thinking can be learned with years of practice and implementation.

Critical thinking is lacking in many business schools in a way that limits the nature of business thinkers to make proper strategic choices. Business schools should provide a clear definition and the ability to integrate critical thinking into their curriculum (Bloch & Spataro, 2015). Future managers should have a solid ability to understand and use critical thinking upon graduation.

Critical thinking is the objective analysis of a topic to form an opinion. This is harder than you think as each person holds all types of bias and false beliefs that seem like the only viable answer to a complex issue. The problem is that bias is based in our personal experiences that are hard to refute because our perception creates our reality.

Those that can combine personal experience, knowledge, theory and the experiences of others can create a different sense of critical thinking. Viable alternatives are evaluated based upon objective criteria that lead to a logical conclusion that removes as much bias as possible. Formal metrics and analysis can help balance personal thinking and scientific thinking to understand events in a real way.

Ensuring that business schools help students make proper assessments of situations and then design appropriate strategies is helpful for making future managers. Integrating the knowledge into courses is helpful as students need to have solid definition and a working model of how critical thinking in real life scenarios. Letting them explore their thinking is one of the best medicines for higher performers when they make it to the market.

Bloch, J. & Spataro, S. (2014). Cultivating critical-thinking dispositions throughout the business curriculum. Business Communication Quarterly, 77 (3).

The Customer as a Co-Creator

Businesses often forget that the customer is the end user and they determine the success of any product, service or organization. Designing products with the customer in mind is important but using customer’s feedback in innovating those products can create higher income streams. Reaching out and asking customers for their feedback can take different forms in today’s world. 

The product development process includes ideas generation, screening of ideas, development and testing, business analysis, marketing testing and commercialization (Finch, 2012). New ideas are reviewed for feasibility and then then tested to ensure they work. A thorough analysis of the profitability and marketability of the product is conducted before mass production. 

Great ideas can come from many different locations. An often untapped source is the customer themselves. Product reviews, focus groups, and questionnaires were some of the tools to gain insight into products. As Internet technology develops new ways of collecting and evaluating customer information is beneficial. 

The process of evaluating customer preferences can be as easy as reading online and asking customers directly or as complex as conducting living labs and designing in-depth psychological experiments to understand latent factors. Collecting that information and using the feedback loop to improve products/services over time is beneficial. 

Product and service development takes time. Listening to customer needs helps to develop higher levels of understanding of consumer needs that should be funneled through product/service design to increase customer satisfaction rates. Without this input significant resources are invested into items that don’t appeal to customers and won’t generate significant returns on investment.

Finch, J. (2012). Managerial marketing. San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc.

Integrity and Moral Courage in an Environmental Context

Integrity and moral courage is something we discuss in the textbooks and seek to realize in our lives when handling sensitive issues. Unfortunately, its very existence is defined against the backdrop of difficult discussions that few else would have the courage to undertake. Whether discussing corporations or governments, creating environments that protect those who engage in helpful actions for the betterment of society is important for building a nation bent on improvement.

People with integrity  understand the difference between right and wrong before they can think about mustering the courage to tackle major ethical dilemmas. It is the internal code built upon ingrained values that makes it possible for a person to discriminate between those actions that are moral and those that are immoral. If one doesn’t understand the difference there is no moral dilemma for them to deal with.

Knowing that there is a moral issue at hand is based on the way the person interprets information and maintains their integrity. Moral principles are important for the understanding of information and the potential hazards associated with unethical activities. It is absolutely necessary for building stronger societies to expose and tackle problems.

In any situation where unethical or illegal activity is discovered and one must choose one path over another there is going to be stress. Stress comes from the processing of information and understanding the consequences of certain irreversible actions. Any step that changes a person’s course of history is of grave concern.

If one makes a decision to protect the greater good of society and one’s integrity over the needs of job security and personal gain is made, the consequences can be dire. Organizations don’t often assume liability for illegal activities and generally seek to minimize damage, skirt the spirit of laws, and use their powerful connections to influence outcomes of cases.

Taking action can be a life altering event as each side seeks to minimize damage and find the faults of others to mitigate responsibility. Moral courage occurs when one acts with integrity and is willing to accept the consequences of protecting the company, its products, and their own personal integrity; sometimes from themselves.

An open and progressive environment will determine whether or not this moral courage can be realized in any particular entity. The right environment encourages open lines of communication through protections, investigations, correcting misjudgments, and listening to issues before reacting. Blowing the whistle is not an easy process and relies on more than simple belief systems to realize and act. Environments that do not react appropriately will find themselves with less integrity as new expectations become culturally engrained.

The Responsibility of Protecting America’s Data

American’s have lots of data in cyber world and if one had access to all of the Internet searches, purchases, phone calls, household information, text, emails, and databases there would be a solid consumer profile on just about anyone. Large databases stored in corporations and government offices are attractive because of their wealth of information. Protecting data has emerged as a top initiative.

The problem is that this data is not useless and contains an abundance of sensitive financial and personal information. Data that is not important in isolation can be worth much more when combined with other large databases. Cross analysis can create all types of connections among behaviors and information.

Businesses have a responsibility to protect data against foreign governments, corporations, or individuals that seek to exploit this information for their own interests. Consumers expect their data to be protected from misuse and to be secure. This is even more so when they don’t know their data is being collected.

As information becomes stored in various locations across the globe and more transactions become electronic the distance between two entities no longer makes much difference. A person from across the globe could be stealing information and buying products just as easily as a person a few blocks away..

In recent history we have become aware of major hacking of millions of documents from the Office of Personnel Management. Hacking has been an ongoing event long time but we have only now become aware of the data that was moving out of this office. Truckloads of data hauled out under our noses.

By this point the information may been sold to thieves, hackers, governments, and other exploiters. No one knows for sure who would go through all this trouble and what their plans are for the information were. We do know that their strategy wasn’t designed to use millions of background checks for the best interest of society; at least not our society. Better protection of data will be important in the decades to come.

Fishing the Global Market for Higher Returns

Pools of motivated customers exist in the market and companies that can find them are able to tap their customer pools to create higher returns on marketing investment. Access to new customers rests in market research and treaties that open these markets for revenue generation.

Market research allows a company to determine who is most likely interested in their product and where they can find them. A thorough research approach should also include the types of media needed to reach your target market. In the international environment this can take significant time but can improve performance. 

Certain customers will be interested in your products/services more than others. Knowing who they are makes the entire sales process easier as they come to the company “hot”. An organizational will then need to know how to reach them and the marketing mediums that have the highest rates of return. 

Treaties help ensure that trade can actually be conducted. If there is no treaty it may be unlawful or expensive to conduct business in certain countries. Solidly designed treaties provide American companies’ access to new customers but also protect the products/services companies offer. 

Fishing the global market requires a willing partner in government along with intensive market research. Business pushes for expansion of reach and government opens the door. Knowing where the hungriest fish are and having the boat to get there is great but then using the right bait and hook can lure them into biting.  Fishing trips should start with a little research.