When you struggle to find meaningful measures for your strategic goals, there are a few problems that have to be fixed. I've written passionately and prolifically about how weasel words make goals immeasurable. And there's another problem too, called multi-focus. Multi-focus is when we blend several performance results into a single goal statem...

Most managers and executives will never have truly transformational performance measures because they aren't prepared to pay the price for them. The price isn't a consultant's invoice, or a training registration fee, or a swanky dashboard. The price is discomfort. And for many, it would seem, this price is simply too high.

Particularly in larger organisations, not much organisation-wide change can happen (and stick) without executive support. Implementing a new performance measurement approach is particularly hard without executive support. But there is a way to win executive support for KPIs. A way that consistently works...

Whether you're an executive looking for the right person to lead your corporate performance measure implementation, or you're a strategy or performance professional wanting to position yourself as a performance measurement expert, you need to understand what mastery in the field of performance measurement looks like. You need to be able to recognise someone who possesses this mastery.

Back in the 1990s process thinking was all the rage. Organisations world-wide were identifying their core business processes, mapping and flowcharting and doing Six Sigma and Lean and BPR to ramp up business performance. Was it just a fad?

Do you have KPIs or measures that are lurking lifelessly and in large numbers in your performance reports? No-one ever goes near them, and they refuse to die despite all the usual arguments to get rid of them. You have Zombie KPIs.

Can you prove that measuring and monitoring people's performance actually does improve the performance of the organisation? I'll be you can't. A very fundamental dynamic prevents it.

Much of the time and effort that goes into measuring performance is rework. We rethink why we're measuring, we rethink what we're measuring, and we rethink how we're measuring. Sometimes this rethinking is important. But most of the time it's complete waste.

Performance measures aren’t doing their best work when you treat them as a tick-and-flick monitoring tool. They are only giving you one angle on performance. Often the insights you need will come from a richer story that needs more characters to give a fuller picture.