The Right Numbers

I attended a business networking event to discuss the West of England devolution issue this week.  I got a chance to ask a question, I like questions, and making the point I was broadly supportive of the idea but wanted to understand better I asked a three part question.  1a - What are three things the LEP has delivered over the past three years.  1b - if we jumped three years into the future what three things would devolution have delivered.  1c - What is the plan to address the endemic inefficiency in public services.  The first two got decent answers but part c threw everyone and after a bit of a conflab I got the answer 'we'll have to put that one down to be worked on', to which I responded well in my business the mantra is what get's measured get's done, and if you don't plan to measure it then as sure as eggs are eggs it won't get done.  Anyway this got me thinking about numbers, I know my mind can be a surreal place.  So we all know it is true if you measure something that it gets paid attention and what gets paid attention invariably gets better.  And it gets better because numbers make it hard to hide.  But to be fair therein may lie the problem.

You see business income is really easy to measure, personal income is easy to measure, but that easily leads to the idea if you earn more you are better.  It is the same in the social media, likes are really easy track but carries the risk that you pander to a small vociferous modernity and get sucked into a race to the bottom.

So should we actually be asking the question.  What is success, what does it mean to win?  Is it a measurable number or is it something less tangible?  Does importance equate to popularity?  Does mass acceptance equate to making a significant impact?  Or if you want to get really down and dirty is the bestseller actually the best book?

Now please don't misunderstand me, we should never lose sight of the fact that the right numbers matters, but as I always recall my farming uncle telling me when I was a kid, "you don't fatten a pig by measuring it".  For me the key words in that are "right numbers".  I have been invited to talk at a business convention this summer and I have been researching material around innovation.  One area of research  is Henry Ford.  He worked out how to build a car way cheaper than his competitors, so cheap he could sell at their production price or even lower.  His 'right numbers' were around the cost of manufacture.                                 Another book I read in my research was 'The Gift of Good Earth' by Wendell Berry, a stunning denouement of agribusiness and farmers who measured their success in terms of yield without thinking about the impact of flavour, nutrition, soil loss and all the other side effects.  The wrong numbers.
I also read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and specifically the Paul van Riper case study where he was up against generals who measured body count, and with a bit of innovation he made them look so stupid they reran the war games and excluded him.  A case of the right and wrong numbers.

The point I am making is when you measure things, make sure you measure the right things, because if you measure the wrong things you end up with the wrong results.  However, measure the right things and you will almost certainly see good results, maybe even great results.

So what I am trying to say this week is lets invest time in working out the right stuff to measure rather than simply generating numbers that can easily lead us astray.