ABSTRACT
The key to having a good measurement system is to have a good strategy. The key to a sound measurement system is to avoid disconnects among measures, goals, and key success factors. The problem is not the measure; the problem is the importance placed on it. If employees and management believe that short-term, cost-related measures are more important than longer-term measures like gains and losses of customers, this will guide their behavior. Organizations that truly want to live by the values they have on their walls have found ways of measuring their progress toward this. Values are soft and fuzzy; performance measures are usually hard and quantifiable. Inevitably, the hard quantifiable stuff gets the attention, often at the expense of the softer measures. The measure Corning selected was being picked by Fortune magazine in its annual poll of America’s most admired corporations.
