Tag: Measures of Success

I'll be teaching my "Better Metrics" workshop (aka "Measures of Success," ala my book) twice in June: Cambridge Investments - Open for Public Registration (Fairfield, Iowa) -- June 5 Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit (Chicago) -- June 13 After facilitating the Red Bead Experiment in the workshop, one other way I've found to simulate variation is an online simulation that's available, of all places, on the BBC website: "Can chance make you a killer?"

Thanks to Eric Ries and the organizers for Lean Startup Week for allowing me to share video of my 15-minute talk from last year's event. One reason for sharing this today is to celebrate yesterday's initial release of the in-progress version of my book Measures of Success. If you buy the book now, you'll get a PDF of the first three chapters, or about 40% of the book's expected content.

Today, I’m giving a keynote talk at the Lean & Six Sigma World Conference being held in Las Vegas. I don’t normally attend or speak at “Lean Sigma” events, but I had an opportunity to give a new talk that touches on two of my favorite themes in recent years – the need to apply statistics and psychology to our “Lean Management” practices or Six Sigma or whatever.

Measures matter. The proper analysis of data and performance metrics allow us to separate good changes from bad, progress from stagnation. The methods in my book, Measures of Success, help us determine if our performance is getting better, getting worse, or essentially remains unchanged. Having the right set of balanced scorecard metrics is important. But the role of leaders is important, too. How do leaders interpret measures? How do they respond to changes in metrics? How do they know if a change is worth reacting to?