Lead

5

MEASURE & MONITOR

“MANAGEMENT is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

PETER DRUCKER

THE FIFTH ABSOLUTE FOR LEADERS:

Peter Drucker's oft-quoted management platitude “what gets measured gets managed” is also oft misunderstood. It's not that it's not true—measurement is essential—but analytics alone can be as damaging as they are productive.

Some things, after all, are pointless to measure—if your goal, say, is to launch a rocket to the moon, you wouldn't measure how many calories the engineering team consumed in a week.

Measurement allows you to avoid becoming the leader of the inevitable.

“If you aren't measuring, you're just practicing.”

KEVIN PLANK, CEO, Under Armour

That's a glib example, but the danger of getting lost in metrics is real, and greater than ever in today's Big Data world, with IT systems enabling every and any organizational minutia to be recorded and spit out in reports that can quickly drown an office in reams of paper. No, instead, the platitude finds its proper context in another of Drucker's sayings: “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”

To do the right things, you've got to be prepared to tap the ...