tl;dr: Red/green metrics encourage snap judgments and overreaction. Process Behavior Charts provide context, separate signal from noise, and help leaders make better decisions that reduce wasted effort and drive real improvement. Thanks again to Prof. Eric Olsen for inviting me…
I’m really excited to have collaborated with Chris Chapman on a webinar that we presented jointly on Monday June 1. Here is the recording: You can get the slides and more here via this page. I’ve followed with great interest…
Thanks to ASQ for asking me to write this article for their “Statistics Digest” newsletter in October of 2019 – click here to access the whole issue if you’re a member. I’m posting the article here with their permission. Readers…
Shout out and hat tip to Dan Markovitz for his excellent blog post: “WHEN LEADERS TORTURE THEIR EMPLOYEES“ He makes a strong case that displaying three months of customer satisfaction this way might lead to a lot of wasted effort…
Each time I teach my “Measures of Success” workshop for Catalysis at one of their events, they give me feedback scores from the attendees. I try to practice what I preach — around reflection, the voice of the customer, continuous…
I’m going to think out loud here about book pricing for the paperback version of Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More — in the name of transparency and getting input, I’ll share some thoughts below. As for timing, the…
TL;DR: Headlines calling College Football Playoff ratings “all-time lows” are technically true but misleading. When viewed with Process Behavior Charts, the ratings show routine variation, not a meaningful decline. Overexplaining year-to-year changes wastes time and distracts leaders from improving the…
Hi All – here’s a collection of the most read Mixtape links from 2018. I compiled the links with the greatest number of viewers and then organized them into some themes. Enjoy! Setting goals and developing effective and actionable KPIs is a…
I recently saw this headline:
Baseball on pace for lowest batting average since 1972
Just because it's the lowest average in 48 years... it doesn't mean that this year's MLB-wide batting average is low in a way that's statistically meaningful.
oday's episode is the second time that friend and podcast guest Jamie Flinchbaugh has turned the tables by playing host to interview me about my new book, Measures of Success: React Less, Lead Better, Improve More, which has recently been the #1 best selling book in Amazon's Total Quality Management category.
Jamie is very knowledgeable on these topics, so he was a great person to interview me and to have more of a conversation about choosing the right metrics and then managing them the right way. I hope you enjoy the conversation and future podcasts will return to the usual format where I interview guests and try to let them do most of the talking.
Here is my latest article that I published on LinkedIn:
Is the Reported Drop in Major League Baseball Attendance a "Signal" or "Noise" in the Data?
As I blogged about yesterday, things went well at the Oscars... or, at least, no errors were made in the announcements. But that thing that didn't go well was the TV ratings.
Two Data Points Are Not a Trend
The headlines I saw had a lot of two-data-point comparisons. Headlines sometimes gave the percentage decrease in viewers or how many million fewer viewers there were. Many talked about "record low" but if you're tracking a metric "record low" or "all-time high" doesn't mean there's a "special cause." That "record low" could still be noise in the system.
