Four Steps to measuring what matters

The statistics that companies use most often to track and communicate performance include financial measures such as sales and earnings per share growth. Yet these have only a flimsy connection to the objective of creating shareholder value .

Executives cling to these metrics because they are overconfident in their intuition, they misattribute the causes of events, and they do not escape the pull of the status quo.

Useful statistics have two qualities. They are persistent, showing that the outcome of an action at one time will be similar to the outcome of the same action at a later time; and they are predictive demonstrating a causal relationship between the action and the outcome being measured ... READ MORE

Released by Harvard Business Review - 9 October 2012