Daily Learnings: Mon, Jan 15, 2024

The more sand that has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it. — Jean-Paul Sartre

Notes on Business Leadership Principles

During a meeting today we discussed several key leadership principles. I found these to be really insightful and wanted to summarize / share them:

It’s very important to clarify and deeply understand our key metrics, the ones that matter most to our company
- We’re trying to find the critical drivers to really thrive as a business for each “process” our company has
- Examples of “processes”: sales, finance, delivery, customer satisfaction, etc…
We need to move towards bottom-up accountability vs. top-down accountability

A lot of companies don’t spend enough time really considering these metrics, and even fewer spend time clarifying and implementing good systems to gain visibility into them
Think of defining the metrics as creating a treasure map, not super detailed
- It might not be 100% accurate, but at least it will give you a general direction of places to look or dig to find the informational nuggets for strategic and practical decisions
To define these metrics, consider asking some of these questions:
- “If I was totally off the grid for 6mo, and could only receive a weekly report with 5-10 metrics about process X, what would be the most important things to see to make sure that I was dialed into the company’s progress?”
Keep the total number of metrics per process relatively low, no more than 10, ideally fewer
Process for defining the metrics for a given system:
- Consider making a list of as many important metrics that you can think of
- Whittle the list down and be vigorous in your review to see if there are metrics that overlap with others
- Allow for and encourage discussion about opinions about which metrics matter