“Which blogs are the most popular?” It’s a question I’ve started hearing again lately, especially as many of my work colleagues have begun experimenting with social media. This is an unanswerable measurement question, just like for analyst relations or marine terminal gates. To try to answer the question, many people cite Technorati’s Top Blogs (original link…
Tag Archives | metrics
Healthy Living in Hard Times
A few weeks ago I got a chance to listen to Geoff Colvin talk about his new book, The Upside of the Downturn. Geoff, a long-time editor and columnist for Fortune Magazine, is an engaging speaker and he peppered his opening comments with headlines from that morning’s newspapers. He also made the intriguing claim death…
Halloween Metrics
Halloween statistics can be scary. According to a survey of 8,526 people conducted by BIGresearch for the National Retail Federation (NRF), consumers spent an average of $56.31 on Halloween in 2009, down 15% from $66.54 last year. The survey blames the economy, citing that nearly a third of consumers said the economy negatively impacted their…
Blog Metrics: Frequency of Posts
For those of you who remember the series of posts two years ago defining objectives for this blog, you’ll recall that I decided that average number of comments per post and number of unique visitors per month were better measures of my success than number of page views or frequency of posts. Regardless, I was…
Smooth-sailing Fallacy
In a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled “Management lessons from the financial crisis,” UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt coins the term smooth-sailing fallacy: This smooth-sailing fallacy arises when we mistake a measure for reality. Competent management always looks deeper than the numbers, deeper than the current measures. Incompetent management just focuses on the metrics, on the body…
Lawn Activities, Yard Outcomes
Performance management continuously invades my personal life, whether it’s on airplanes, during mentoring, or at Thanksgiving dinner. Here’s another example: Not long after I moved into my previous house, a friendly neighbor came over to welcome me to the block. Amid advice on local stores and restaurants, he pointed out that my front lawn wasn’t…
What’s Missing from your Scorecard?
In a short, but insightful, piece called ‘What’s Missing from Your Scorecard?’ Mark Graham Brown suggests eight categories of metrics which should be better represented on a balanced scorecard: Mark’s issue with employee satisfaction is most companies measure it annually which provides little opportunity to take action on the findings. While I agree, I also worry about…
Fun with tenure metrics
At last week’s meeting of the CMO Community, a representative of the executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart mentioned that the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers at U.S. companies is 28 months, up five months from 2006. Great news, I thought, given my current role. However, remembering the earlier confusion on CFO tenure, I decided to do some fact…
Eliminate Management By Objectives
I’m deep into the annual review cycle and struggling with not-so-SMART objectives for employees that I inherited during the year. The frustration is acute enough that it makes me want to channel Deming and eliminate management by objectives. For those who may not remember, Deming is best known for his work in the 1950’s during which he…
Centennial Post
This is my 100th post! I realize that it may seem a bit hypocritical for me to be celebrating a milestone based on an activity metric, rather than an outcome one. As I pointed out in a post trying to define the mission and objectives for this blog, the quality of the posts is much…