The 7 Deadly Sins of Measurement

The Seven Deadly Sins of Measurement

Jim Champy, coauthor, with Harry Greenspun, of Reengineering Health Care: A Manifesto for Radically Rethinking Health Care Delivery, introduces a lesson on the pitfalls of measurement from Faster, Cheaper, Better: The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done, by Michael Hammer and Lisa W. Hershman.

The late Mike Hammer always delivered the unexpected in a strong voice with an intelligent edge that woke you up. When we coauthored Reengineering the Corporation, I discovered that no partner could have been more insightful, more probing into the behaviors of companies and their managers. Mike also had a great talent for metaphor. He said that inefficiencies were like fat marbled into a piece of meat, and that to get costs out you had to grind up the company and fry out the fat. That metaphor never made it into our first book. I told Mike that executives wouldn’t respond well to the notion of treating their companies so brutally.
But that didn’t stop Mike from being a radical thinker, always challenging the way things are done. He disdained the notion “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” In this excerpt, from the book that Mike was working on before his untimely death at age 60 in 2008 (a work completed by his colleague Lisa W. Hershman), you will see that even things that look right can be wrong. Read it several times to grasp everything that’s here on how managers misuse metrics and measurement processes — sometimes unwittingly, sometimes purposely to deceive. It’s quintessential Hammer.

— Jim Champy

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Excerpted from Chapter 2 of Faster, Cheaper, Better:
The 9 Levers for Transforming How Work Gets Done

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In the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great formulated his famous list of the seven deadly sins — gluttony, greed, wrath, lust, sloth, envy, and pride. There are also seven sins of corporate measurement. Gregory’s list was meant to help an individual’s quest for salvation. Ours is more mundane: saving companies from fatal flaws in performance measurement...

What Manufacturers Expect in 2011

What Manufacturers Expect in 2011

By David R. Butcher

The nation's manufacturing sector has held up better than other sectors during an uneven economic recovery and is expected to continue expanding. Economic forecasters and business leaders are boosting their year-end and 2011 estimates for United States growth, prompted by higher demand and increased production. Moreover, manufacturers are more optimistic about an economic uptick for their businesses in 2011, according to a spate of new data....

Seven Tips to Forecasting Effectiveness

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Visit this group Companies strive to adopt new ways to improve forecasting and planning. And according to the WSJ article Thinking about tomorrow – Seven tips for making forecasting more effective, collaboration is the key. High-Performance organizations take collaboration further, integrating operations with vendors and suppliers in ways that give each party access to data that helps keep the supply-chain flowing and inventories lean. Once such links are established, a manufacturer, for example, no longer has to guess at a vendor’s inventory or future promotional plans, hence forecasts — and sales — improve.   Here are the seven tips from the article to make forecasting more effective Get Senior Executives Involved Explain the Mutual Benefits Clearly Define Goals and Agreements Use the Best Technology Focus Where Revenue and Profits Are Greatest Link Incentives to Companywide Goals Aim for Continuous Improvement