Give me a poor metric and I will give you a reason to fail!

I have always believed ‘Experience is a tough teacher’, as long as one invests time and effort in performing a postmortem of every situation & reflecting on the positives and the negatives. A biased penchant for one can lead to unhealthy results. I recently ran into some one (organization) that had the best of interests but an unnatural bias. It seemed like as if they had their blinkers (British term for blinders) on. So gruesome was the situation that I had to revise my quote above, ‘Success can sometimes be a poor teacher’.

Individuals and organizations always learnt what works and reapplied it over and over and often times independent of the situation, the challenge or the opportunity to its own peril. Strategy is not a formula, nor is success a recipe! The only ideals that can be reapplied are frameworks and principles.

Don’t look for a manager when you need a leader and don’t look for a marketer when you need a salesman! Each one in his/her different and unique way defines and measures success, instant gratification works for one while the other is out to build, one strives to create direction while the other chooses to be focused.

Poor metrics are a sure short recipe for failure! It is unfortunate that organizations can make their success the very reason to fail.