Ben Compton shared
> This is a reply to my message on measurements from a close, personal
> friend. He and I spent over three years working together at Novell. He and
> I had breakfast nearly every morning to discuss the world around us. I
> thought his thoughts were pertinent.
>
> The resukting post was very useful but there was one point that remained unexplored. In talking about the difficulty of measurementes the author wrote:
...snip...
> I think most measurement schemes in business fail because of the great
> difficulty in gathering data. It's not that you don't know how to tell
> worse from better, but that you don't have time to observe.You try to find
> an operational indicator to stand for what you really want to measure
> because its impractical to measure directly.
He then goes on to a good example in which people were rewarded for the
number and not the quality of atsks they completed. He concludes from this
example
...snip...
>It wasn't that I
> couldn't measure what was good and what was crap, just that there's no
> time to directly observe and measure that kind of performance.
There is another route and it involves greater participation by those
people who are responsible for the tasks. Were they involved in the design
of their own work? Were they fully enrolled in some vision for their
group, for the company as a whole? I wonder because much of what the
author said about measurement was very useful and yet this possibility -
gaining more data by doing more participative job design - was not
broached in the post. Additionally, this element of asking people what
they should be doing and how they should do it includes geting them to
commit to what the key performance indicators will be if all goes well.
As the author wrote,
> You solve such a problem with intelligence and deep understanding of
> the dynamics of your business and context, but you then judge the
> solution based on the numbers changing.
My question is whether that 'you' is 2nd person singular or plural? If it
is the latter, what is the extent of the plurality? Is the company getting
at everybody's intelligence, understanding, and intuition or just that of
a few?
-- T.J. Elliott Cavanaugh Leahy http://idt.net/~tjell 914 366-7499Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>