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The Great Game of Measurements

This morning Seth Godin makes some comments related to employees at Sears gaming the system setup by management to try to get customers served within 10 minutes. I completely agree with the comment at the end of the post.

"Often, more effort goes into circumventing a system then it would take to just do a great job in the first place..."

This is more of a "fact" than an observation and anyone who has tried to put measurement and reward systems in place knows this.

Often when first trying to put a system in place the people on the team immediately seek to find a way to "game the system" and the desired results are not achieved.

If this is the first time management has tried to put something like this in place they get frustrated and simply throw up their hands saying "this will never work!"

What needs to happen is that management needs to look hard at both how and why the rules of the game and scoring system did not produce the desired business results. They then need to tweak the system a little and watch, tweak and watch, again and again.

Over time this practice will produce a great operating system for the company. If you give up on every system that does not work without asking why and then trying to tweak it a company will just move from one worthless measurement system to the next without ever achieving results.

One of the best books I have read regarding this subject is "The Great Game of Business"

Posted by David on March 7, 2007 06:33 AM|Permalink

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