{"id":2387,"date":"2019-12-10T01:00:30","date_gmt":"2019-12-10T08:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=2387"},"modified":"2021-06-21T12:06:53","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T18:06:53","slug":"are-metrics-harming-your-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/are-metrics-harming-your-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Metrics Harming Your Business?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>The September\/October 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review asks this question. The answer is obvious, but some people will read this the wrong way. Here&#8217;s why:<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/356486579?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\"><\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;This is a September \/ October 2019 edition of the Harvard Business Review. You can see here it says, \u201cAre Metrics Undermining Your Business?\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Now the essence of the article is \u201cBad metrics drive bad behavior.\u201d Well, I think we all know that, but I think too often people who hate metrics will just look at that and say, \u201cThere&#8217;s proof! See? Measurements are ruining our business. We\u2019ve got to go back to gut feel, common sense and trial-and-error.\u201d Wrong! All right? Wrong-o!<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;If you are not measuring things, you can&#8217;t get better at it. As good as you&#8217;re going to get with common sense, trial-and-error, and gut feel, there&#8217;s going to be a 1% error rate, or about 4 Sigma. That&#8217;s as good as you&#8217;re ever going to get, because at that point all your five senses stop working so you can&#8217;t see it, hear it, or feel it anymore. It doesn&#8217;t happen often enough for you to say, \u201cOh, there&#8217;s a problem.\u201d<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So if you want to get to four, five, six, seven sigma, you&#8217;re going to have to use some metrics, but you have to make sure that those metrics (especially if they&#8217;re attached to money) don&#8217;t drive stupid behavior (and they can).<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So, that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week. I&#8217;m Jay Arthur. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week. &#8220;<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The September\/October 2019 issue of Harvard Business Review asks this question. The answer is obvious, but some people will read this the wrong way. Here&rsquo;s why: &ldquo;This is a September \/ October 2019 edition of the Harvard Business Review. You can see here it says, &ldquo;Are Metrics Undermining Your Business?&rdquo; &ldquo;Now the essence of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4793,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[290,3,7],"tags":[276,202,118,61,338,168,140,170],"class_list":["post-2387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-improvement-insights","category-lean","category-six-sigma","tag-agile-lean-six-sigma","tag-data-mining","tag-lean-six-sigma","tag-measurement","tag-metrics","tag-qi-macros","tag-quality-improvement","tag-six-sigma"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2387"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3634,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2387\/revisions\/3634"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4793"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}