Mark Graham Brown

Flying an aircraft is a nearly perfect performance management system. First of all, there is always a detailed flight plan so the pilots know the route, destination and are alerted to any weather or airport delay issues. Pilots themselves are thoroughly screened and receive excellent training. They are provided with adequate fuel, hopefully a well maintained aircraft, and other resources like coffee and food. Cockpits … [ Read more ]

How to Avoid Corporate Middle-Age Spread

As organizations go from birth to maturity to middle age, they tend to become flabby and fail to spend enough time on the things that made them successful in the beginning. This article looks at how to measure and manage the time your employees and partners spend on valuable versus possibly time-wasting activities.

A Little Knowledge Management Can Be a Dangerous Thing

According to the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC), knowledge management (KM) is defined as: “a systematic process of connecting people to people and people to knowledge and information they need to effectively act and create new knowledge.” But is KM is worthwhile business practice and, if so, how should it be measured?

The Customer Aggravation Index: Predicting Customer Loyalty Without Surveys

Leading companies like Fed Ex and others have found that a daily metric that tracks occurrence of errors that frustrate customers can be a simple and easy way of measuring and predicting when a customer might leave and never come back.

The Ten Most Common Errors in Developing Performance Measures

We can measure how prolific a baseball player is, how profitable a company might be and how effective a salesperson is at his craft. But when it comes to measuring a company’s progress in achieving organizational targets, we often make glaring errors. Rarely do we measure the right things for the right reasons. Rather, we choose the wrong metrics to track the wrong trends, measuring … [ Read more ]

9 Magic Metrics Your Organization Needs to Adopt

It’s rare a singular metric like turnover or a customer survey score is by itself a good measure of an organization’s performance. Most of the more meaningful measures on dashboards of executives today are indices, made up of three to five submeasures. I review the nine most useful and creative performance measures I have seen in government and business organizations over the last few years. … [ Read more ]