Act with Purpose

Have you ever found yourself so busy that you fail to see the forest for the trees? That is, you are so busy doing 'tasks' that you forget why you are doing them? I think this can happen the best of people in any organization large or small. Due to constraints (financial, resource etc) small companies are less likely to do this or at least do it for long before they find themselves out of business, but I believe it is something that you need to remind yourself about every day. I found a quote the other day over at Found+Read that sums this up very well:

Don’t confuse activity for progress.

Time is precious. Act with purpose.

Its not enough to throw this out in a staff meeting, up as a quote on the wall or even as part of your company values unless you also live it every day. Remind yourself regularly, make it a part of what you do, and also part of how you speak. It will then spread to others and become rooted in your culture.

Many times, I believe that large companies could become less bloated, more efficient and effective if they could just embed this simple philosophy, not just as a statement inside their company walls, but as a strand into their cultural fiber.

(By the way a little plug for an item in my blogroll - Found+Read is a fairly new entrepreneurial blog that is a great resource for anything who falls in this category or wants to fall into this category. The other think I like about it, is that it is a blog with some social networking aspects build it - to me this model makes it more 'sticky' than other blogs in your feed list)

Re-thinking Performance Metrics

Last year due to the startup I was working on, I spent a lot of time trying to understand ROI - Return on Innovation. Its one of those metrics where the companies that have this metric think they have it down, but is it really measuring what they want it to? Is number of filed patents or number of 'launched' products really a measure of your return on innovation?

Since then, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how metrics are changing and shifting in the new economy. What non traditional metrics could be used to better measure and drive performance in an organization? I think one of the issues with most traditional metrics or even the various definitions of newer metrics such as return on innovation is that they tend to ignore the people factor - your customers and employees.

John Hagel has created some great thoughts for new performance metrics including Return on Attention (ROA), and Return on Information (yet another ROI). His most recent thinking is around ROS - Return on Skills or more accurately Return on Talent:

For me, talent is ultimately about the ability to deliver superior value through one’s activities, whether it is the janitor or the CEO. There are no caps to talent - no matter how good people are at what they do, there are infinite opportunities to deliver even more value. Talent is ultimately a function of human capital, intellectual capital, social capital and structural capital working together to amplify the value that can be delivered.

What other metrics could be explored? I think it would be interesting explore ROCS - Return on Customer Service, or ROA - Return on Authenticity. Next step - how to define and create measures to support these. What other types of metrics do you think could help drive performance in the new economy?