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Confuse means with ends: With high velocity and unprecedented level of uncertainty, the business management today needs to see the whole picture, determine what the future needs to look like and what digital transformation must look like. The wrong end can lead to catastrophic business setback. More often than not, organizations have to adjust their directions accordingly in order to adapt to frequent changes promptly. In reality, many companies focus on transactional level of activities, keep the business spinning but going nowhere. The stagnation will further make the business irrelevant gradually and lose its competitive advantage. If some companies thought they are playing with fancy technology gadgets, thus, they are riding the tide of digitalization, perhaps they also confuse means with ends. Keep in mind, information technology is the means to an end, not the end. Information is the gold when it has been used to make an informed management decision to develop the right products, services, or business models, enter a new market, or explore a new digital channel, etc. Technology is the savior if it can improve customer satisfaction, empower employees to change or catalyze innovation. When the organizations can focus on problem-solving, they are able to dig into underlying business processes and pain areas, bring out customer-tailored and technology-driven solutions, and devote more attention to what organizations really care about. Digital transformation is not just about technology, it has to expand into every direction of the business for unlocking business performance and improving the organizational maturity.

Put the wrong people in the position to solve wrong problems: As always, people are the most invaluable business asset and capital, but often the weakest link for business transformation. Putting the right people with the right capability to solve the right problem is simply the biggest challenge facing businesses and our society today. And it’s much easier to say than doing because it involves multiple intelligence judgment and assessment processes to evaluate people and problems in an objective way. In today’s VUCA new normal, complex problem solving takes interdisciplinary understanding or integral professional competencies to both frame the right problems and solve them in the right way. When organizations make talent assessments only based on linear logic or conventional talent management methodology, more often or not, they miss the point and put the wrong people to solve wrong problems or even create more problems. Cognitively, often people are both the cause and the center of the problem. Diagnosing the problem from the mindset level is a critical step for digging into the root causes of many problems today. Thus, the assessment should start at the mindset level, quality counts, dynamic counts, and learning agility counts. Select the right people who possess the advanced mind with multidimensional intelligence, proficient knowledge, nonlinear skills and unique problem-solving competencies to move the business forward and accelerate digital transformation.

Ignore measuring something important or measure the wrong things: You can only manage what you measure, mis-measurement and ineffective performance management cause the business mighty fall. From a strategic management perspective, one of the most dangerous pitfalls of performance measurement is when performance system is connected with the motivation system on an operational level, but disconnected from the strategy management. Sometimes, metrics motivate people to game the data, rather than make real achievement; encourage mediocrity, rather than creativity; or the metrics only tell part of the story but ignore the full pictures, etc. Keep in mind, the right metrics are requested in the right context; it’s important to explain to the upper management of why they are requested, to ensure the management buy-in. To avoid varying performance measurement pitfalls, the management needs to clarify which culture you would like to shape and what kind of behavior you should encourage. It’s critical to ensure that digital performance measures are both qualitative and quantitative, correlate to build differentiated business competency and achieve better business outcomes. The effective performance management directly impacts on day-to-day decision-making, business adaptability, and overall organizational maturity.

There is no one size fits all formula to build strategy competency and run a high performance digital business. Digital leaders must ensure the business having a clear vision, well-defined business goals and gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors. Each organization just has to "walk the talk," avoid hidden trap or fatal mistakes and explore their unique way to enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.

Digital makes a significant impact on how we think, live, and work. There is a mix of old and new, physical and virtual, order and chaos. We are in a time of tremendous change, the dawn of the digital age, the path to the next level of digital maturity, also in the era of confusion and information overload. Therefore, it’s critical to identify, understand, and avoid pitfalls, discover strategic and predictive pathways to change, increase confidence, position a brand and leverage resources to make the digital paradigm shift effortlessly. Slideshare Presentation

                 Overcoming the Variety of Business Inertia 

How to Overcome Three Digital Inertia We have moved into the deep, deep digital age when information is abundant and where creativity becomes a baseline competence. The race of information against the machine is ongoing, and the knowledge life cycle is significantly shortened. Many organizations are also at a crossroad facing unprecedented change and uncertainty, the significant business transformations are needed to digitalization, globalization, and radical innovation management. However, statistically, more than two-thirds of Change Management effort fails to achieve the expected result, so what are the digital inertia you need to deal with, in order to manage a successful digital transformation journey frictionlessly and ultimately build a Digital Master?

How to Handle Change Inertia with Empathy Change is the new normal, but it also becomes fundamentally difficult in most organizations due to the change inertia, also because it is treated as something distinct from running the business, evolving performance and increasing results over time. Statistically, more than 70% of the change management effort fails to achieve the expected result. So, which principles should you follow to communicate changes and transformation is dimensionally bigger, and much more pervasive/ invasive, how to weave all important elements in Change Management more seamlessly to orchestrate a harmonized digital transformation symphony?

How to Overcome Learning Inertia Digital means the abundance of information and a shortened knowledge cycle. As companies around the world transform themselves into the digital business that is based on ‎information, their ability to explore intangible assets such as information and knowledge has become far more decisive to build competitive business advantages. Both at the individual and organizational level, if you fail to climb the learning curve, you will get static and lag behind. Business leaders should be aware of learning curves or learning inertia, make an objective assessment of their organization’s learning competency.

How to Overcome the Inertia in Decision Making One of the most important tasks for management is to make decisions, however, across the sectors, many management teams are happy to "put off making decisions till tomorrow, that is needed today." This is nothing new; in many organizations, indecision is masked as patience. So what’re the root causes in deferring making a decision? And how to overcome such inertia in decision making?

Change Management Sum Up: How to Overcome Change Inertia II Change is inevitable, and organizational change becomes a common practice within an organization, but more than two-thirds of change efforts fail to achieve the expected results. What are the barriers to cause change failures, how to overcome change inertia, how to make Change Management tangible rather than fluffy, and manage change life cycle effectively?

The blog is a dynamic book flowing with your thought; growing through your dedication; sharing your knowledge; conveying your wisdom, and making influence through touching the hearts and connecting minds across the globe. The “Future of CIO” Blog has reached 3 million page views with about #6000 blog posting. Among 59+ different categories of leadership, management, strategy, digitalization, change/talent, etc. Blogging is not about writing, but about thinking and innovating new ideas; it’s not just about WHAT to say, but about WHY to say, and HOW to say it. It reflects the color and shade of your thought patterns, and it indicates the peaks and curves of your thinking waves. Unlike pure entertainment, quality and professional content takes time for digesting, contemplation and engaging, and therefore, it takes time to attract the "hungry minds" and the "deep souls." It’s the journey to amplify diverse voices and deepen digital footprints, and it's the way to harness your innovative spirit.

1 There’s knowing unknown, and here’s unknowing unknown, so it's not a new topic about “Blind Spots. The blind spots are perhaps inevitable, the point is how business leaders or managers should learn to deal with them seamlessly.

2 The root causes of blinds port are often the people’s mentality such as ego or bias, thought processes such as lack of “whole brain” thinking, or lack of knowledge or insight.

3 It’s important to build high-performance teams with the heterogeneous group setting, complementary skills, and distinctive capabilities in order to fill blind spots, clear business vision, and spur creativity

4 To close blind spots, you have to be humble to realize there are many things you know you don’t know and perhaps even more which you don't know what you don't know. Until that happens, you will continue in the lives of blindness

5 Continue to see the importance of dealing with blind spots by learning how to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

6 Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution.

7 To close blind spots, be humble to learn; be hungry for the insight, be skillful to frame the right questions and behold to the metrics.

8 You need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot, whatever it is and check the "mirrors" that you appreciate the huge favor and gift they have provided you.

9 The company's reputation and success today are founded on innovation and to a very large extent, innovation closes blind spots. The productivity is higher in an innovative organization, and an innovative organization has less blind spots because people do not fear to provide feedback.

Blind spot: To survive in today’s “VUCA” digital new normal, organizations must adapt to rapid changes by making effective decisions in a consistent way. Often, there isn’t always a right or wrong choice in any situation, there are a lot of gray areas and varying blind spots in decision making. Blind spots are usually caused by silo thinking and homogeneous team-setting. They will cloud your vision, trigger poor judgment and lead ineffective decision-making. Therefore, it’s important to challenge, debate, and initiate dynamic and respectful dialogue to broaden perspectives and close blindspots.

In reality, many companies still have rigid organizational hierarchy and bureaucratic culture, their business is still the sum of pieces rather than a holistic whole. Many teams operate with an incomplete and relative small view of the business and take linear management discipline. It’s no surprise that such silo mentalities will create numerous blind spots in talent, resource, process, capacity, and capability management, and further cause failures in strategy execution. Thus, it’s important to develop high-performance leadership team with cognitive difference, complementary skills and distinctive capabilities to identify and fill blind spots and improve their leadership effectiveness.

Dark spot: Individually, negative emotions create dark spots - your fear drains energy and thwarts creativity; your ego is a mask or a costume that you wear in the great play of career or life to hide your authenticity; your envy degrades your integrity or professionalism, etc. Collectively, in the business environment, silo or bureaucratic thinking creates dark spots and generates negative energy. It’s about fear of failure; fear to get out of old habits, fear to lose the status quo. It makes people feel threatened, that’s why learning is stressful. Negative emotions create dark energy, drive misjudgment, and cause inertia to adopt the right course of action. To brighten the dark spot, learn to abide by nature and let the positive dominate the negative through continuous learning, adapting and maturing. As the society, the negative behaviors caused by negative emotions should be discouraged, organizations and society should adore and appreciate those individuals who are directed towards using their superior skills or unique abilities for driving progressive changes and making a better world.

Sweet spot: Compared to change, business transformation is definitely the more ambitious sounding term and a large scale of changes. It is like a treasure hunting journey to uncover the sweet spots and discover hidden gems for business growth. Business managers should take the intrapreneur spirit, turn the status quo upside down for dealing with”VUCA” normality via interdisciplinarity of art and science. They should practice strategic thinking by envisioning the future and clarifying the reality, keep asking themselves and others: What’s our strategic sweet spot? What’s our competitive advantage? What’s the future of business? What's our unique competency? Etc. Organizations that are skillful at exploring the sweet spots of growth can gain long term business advantages by pushing the boundaries of a more complicated business mix that provides opportunities to create inter-business value and build differentiated business advantages. To explore these sweet spots for growth, people are encouraged to take initiatives of stepping outside of the box, seek additional knowledge and experience, and focus on the learning opportunities provided by assignment, rather than on the status quo. Digital is the age of customers. focusing on customer needs should be an easier path to identify sweet spots and grow the innovation fruits continually.

The digital transformation is now spreading rapidly to enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to reinvent themselves. It’s critical to gain a contextual business understanding, look for those critical “hidden spots,” which is not always obvious, see around the corner, read between the lines, to overcome barriers and identify growth opportunities for making a leap to reach the next level of organizational maturity.

Unpredictability: Modern organizations are complex systems which tend to be non-linear and thus, hard to predict the upcoming changes on the way. Often, a part of nonlinear business system emits more energy and that’s going beyond the linear response of that part. It means small changes in the initial conditions could have a much larger and unpredictable consequences in the outcomes of the business system. From the business management perspective, even though you couldn’t predict anything beforehand, you can always imagine different scenarios based on “lessons learned” with many experiences involved in current or in the past. Although not everything is predictable, information is still one of the most important assets of the company. It is a complex domain and information becomes meaningful when being sort through and processed to make sure its coherence. When information is refined into the business foresight and customer insight, it becomes the “light tower” to navigate the business in the right direction. It requires to take leaps of setting some of the right things in motion, and delicately balancing and re-balancing the results toward urgent, but hard to predict outcomes.

Uncertainty: The pace of change is accelerated both in businesses and society, either as an individual or an organization. Uncertainty (of outcomes or occurrences) is inherent in almost every business endeavor, More specifically, uncertainty is a state of having limited knowledge where it is impossible to exactly describe the existing circumstance. From a strategic management perspective, although there is not so much you could do about uncontrollable situation. Still, a good plan can identify external business factors and a structural process can enable an organization to walk around the externals. From a leadership perspective, great leaders supply the framing context in understanding uncertainty and encourage optimism, help to mitigate the impact of uncertainty or risks by enabling a team to encounter uncertainty and deal with it strategically and systematically. They need to visualize and identify uncertainty, convert uncertainty to risk through the application of quantification methods in order to be able to manage uncertainty as risk, and move up management maturity from risk mitigation to risk intelligence.

1 Silo thinking builds the wall in people’s minds and sets barriers in the human's hearts.

2 At their heart, silos are not a structural issue, they are the result of poor thinking; or lack of holistic thinking, systems thinking, and strategic thinking.

3 Silo mentality is fundamentally about keeping the mind static and keeping the people separate rather than keeping work separate.

4 It is critical to break down silo mentality and apply a holistic management discipline which can break through the industrial constraints and limitations in pursuit of possibilities rather than impossibilities.

5 With silo mentality, organizations lose their collaborative advantage as they are being over managed and under led.

6 Silos happen when the "Why?" in business is not properly communicated from the senior level management down through business units.

7 Silo sets the barriers to real problem-solving because people are not comfortable to go across the territories for digging into the root causes, they just get stuck at “we always do things like that” mentality.

8 Many think silo happens when the business operates from a fear standpoint - fear of rejection, fear of invisibility, fear that other peoples' accomplishments will somehow diminish your own, etc. Silos are based on a culture of self-protection and judgment

9 The solution to breaking down silos is to apply bigger thinking -to implement an effective cross-silo strategy, better integral process, and collaborative communication.

Misinformation: IT takes charge of one of the most valuable business assets - information. Information does not live alone but permeates into everywhere in the businesses. Thus, the value of information is not isolated. Misinformation can cause business fail at any moment. If information is unavailable, inaccurate, lost, stolen, or compromised, it will hinder the achievement of business goals, disappoint customers, and even misled the business in the wrong direction. Information is critical, not every piece of information is created equal though. In a business scope, there are some of the important bits and bytes of information needed when evaluating a new market or any emerging business growth opportunity. Information Management is the structural process of aligning the usage of information through the multidisciplinary management discipline. Thus, to strengthen information management link, IT should first work to identify how information is associated with the tangible value of businesses; products and resources. It’s also critical to ensure information quality, accessibility, reliability, and refine information to fully support the business goals and objectives collaboratively.

Miscommunication: The gap between IT and business is reality, and often miscommunication is the root cause. Communication is complicated because there are differences in goals and contexts. There are different business dialects, communication styles, and these contexts can shift frequently. The business system is complex and the organization is multifaceted. Without the contextual understanding of people, process, technology, or system, the blind spots are inevitable and cause miscommunication across functional or geographical borders. Miscommunication enlarges business gaps and decelerates the organizational speed. Communication is the key to improve leadership effectiveness and reinvent IT reputation as a trustworthy business partner. CIOs can lift their role as the strategic business leader and skillful communicator via their unique perspective and insightful abstract. They can communicate effectively with all levels of the organization by interpreting both business and IT issues back and forth accurately without “lost in translation.” The great communicators can communicate objectively with strong logic, clarity, and understanding. Communication is not just the soft discipline, it’s both an art and science.

Misinterpretation: A well-established organization has different dialects, every organizational functions or division has its own focus and dialect. Misinterpretation is perhaps caused by pre-conceptual judgment, random assumptions, or simply lack of deeper understanding. Without using common business language or enforcing mutual understanding, misinterpretation will further cause dysfunctional business management. In fact, the “lost in translation” is the common pitfalls of strategy management. In the digital working environment, context intelligence is about understanding the whole meaning of functional dialects and business cultures or subcultures via connection, discernment, penetration, and perception, etc. Business leaders today need to know how to read between the lines and understand the inter-connectivity between parts and the whole without getting lost in interpretation. They can overcome those communication obstacles, master different business dialects and convey the right message in the right format to tailor different audiences for strengthening business relationship links and improving leadership effectiveness.

Mistrust: Mistrust is often caused by miscommunication, lack of transparency, or micromanagement. Mistrust further causes damages of business relationship and enlarges gaps of involving parties. The deeper the trust, the more valuable the relationship would be. Without a trustful business relationship, every decision becomes an argument and change get stuck. IT leaders have to be able to demonstrate in very tangible ways that IT understands business and builds trustful business-IT relationship via in-depth observation, communication, and empathetic understanding, etc. Transparency is critical to develop a trusting relationship between the business and IT. To keep IT and business on the same page, IT leaders have to reach out horizontally to their business peers. IT, marketing, finance, HR, etc. IT leaders can manage multi-layer relationships such as business peer/shareholder relationship, customer relationship, vendor relationship., etc. Trust = Communication +Transparency + Delegation + Reciprocity + Verification.

Misjudgment: Nothing is certain with the rapid digital flow, business executives, including CIOs have to make assumptions or “forecast” all the time. You have to make them, but you will never have complete information, Forecast precision will help the company prepare the journey for either capturing the rising business opportunities timely or preventing potential risks effortlessly. From decision management perspective, many leaders make poor judgment, due to the lack of comprehensive knowledge, lack of critical thinking, independent thinking, and Systems Thinking abilities, cognitive bias, or preconceived notions. Ego leads to misjudgment as well. Do not fall into linear thought traps, you need to listen, accept, and act on the blind spot. When you intend to understand, interpret and judge something, you need to form a critical opinion of it based on facts, discerned data, common understanding, and clarified notions to ensure the pieces of the puzzle can be integrated into a clear picture.

To identify and strengthen these missing links, business management, especially at the senior management level, needs to gain the contextual understanding of the inter-connectivity of both visible and invisible business success factors, apply interdisciplinary approaches to planning, managing, collaborating, enforce inter-organizational linkage, and take step-wise actions to improve digital management maturity.

1 Complacency almost always stems from a sense of success or living in a comfort zone: More often, a complacency mindset lives long after the success that created has disappeared.

2 Failing to understand the need for change is in a way or another complacency. A complacency mind gets used to reacting, not being proactive.

3 Complacency is at the heart of resistance to change and causes business vulnerability in the face of fierce competitions and frequent disruptions.

4 When business leaders or managers are comfortable with the status quo, they often miss the big picture and become complacent.

5 Numerous changes or business transformations run, complete, and then slowly crumble away as people slowly revert to old ways of doing things, and get stuck with complacency. Once that complacency barrier is broken, people become more creative and learning agile, a positive change process can commence.

6 If most people get stuck in the comfort zone to maintain the status quo, vilify change agents, mediocrity gets rewarded, complacency is mainstream mentality, and different voices get shut off, you are perhaps at the plateau of change, even move downward or lead backward.

7 The point is when complacency sprouts up, people with such mindset stop flowing their energy up towards the positive directions (learning new things, building new capabilities), then, their energy more often flows down to the negative or unprofessional direction.

8 The challenges for both individuals and organizations are to pay attention to CRIC-cycle (Crisis, Response, Improvement, Complacency), and how to try to break the cycle, or transform the last stage (complacency) into a "vigilance" status aimed at anticipating and preventing morphing into the next crisis.

9 It is important to build a culture of learning, encourage people to get out of the comfort zone and overcome complacency.

From monochrome to multidimensional vision for re-imagining the future of the organization: In the digital era with “VUCA” characteristics, vision becomes so important to both capture business growth opportunities and predict risks. Digital leaders today must shape a clear vision and constantly visible by sharing their vision and encouraging others to share theirs as well. They can manifest a vision vividly by taking a broader lens and embracing the full spectrum of colors rather than just "black and white." Lack of vision, tunnel vision, monochrome vision, or the “vision existing on paper only” are all sorts of traps which could mislead management, make bad strategy, cause decision ineffectiveness, and decelerate the speed of changes. Metaphorically, A variety of traffic lights: Red, Yellow, Green, Which color should symbolize the visionary leadership? With conventional wisdom, if you see the green light, it implies that you can see further and drive ahead boldly; if you see the red light, it means you perhaps get some serious issues, need to be cautious and controlling - stop, wait and examine. In fact, to deal with “VUCA” digital new normal, yellow light is a good symbol of visionary leadership - having both courage and caution at the same time. When the yellow light is flashing, leaders have to make judgment calls, set widest range of strategic alternatives and take proper actions all the time. The other vision-related trap is that business executives think that somehow if they have a vision, magically it will become a reality. A passionate connection to vision doesn't mean you will always be excited about it, it means you need to live by it at the daily basis and will be willing to suffer for it as you realize you are responsible for the game-changing effects of its realization.

From micromanagement to macro-management for encouraging autonomy: Nowadays, many organizations suffer from overloaded information, rapid pace of changes and frequent disruptions, the “command and control” management style is gradually running out of steam because today’s workforce is highly educated and fluent with digital technologies, they prefer to make their own choice to communicate and do their work with freedom. To put another way, autonomy or self-management is an emerging digital theme. Therefore, it’s important to lay out the ground rules upfront as a team, make a real shift from micromanagement to macromanagement, set clear goals and measurement to guide the team without over-controlling. A team can be self-organizing in determining the best and most efficient method of delivering the commitments. Holding managers or staff to their accountability is key so that the whole team knows the significant details, the mechanisms, and goals to the annual and long-term goals are vital. If you are pulling the reins too tight, setting too rigid process, or undermining managers or staff to micro run or make a decision without collective input, you probably fall into the micro-management trap. Micro-management is often a culture thing, it can be diagnosed early on and fixed properly to encourage autonomy and improve the team accountability.


From monitor-driven to motivational style of performance management for unleashing talent potential: The purpose of managing performance is about setting performance metrics to make objective assessments and understand performance measurement result. In many traditional organizations, talent performance management turns out to be some practices to monitor people's daily behaviors or an annual routine to focus mainly on past performance. But monitor-driven performance management is not sufficient to nurture a culture of innovation and develop a people-centric digital business. The one way to find out whether the performance measurement and management are effective or not is by looking at the behavior and culture the KPIs are driving. If negativity or unhealthy competition is up, mediocrity is encouraged, and politics is becoming more and more dominant, then you know that performance indicators are perhaps set wrong and performance management evolution is a strategic imperative. Highly effective performance management should facilitate frictionless information flow and motivate people to accomplish their work creatively and achieve performance higher than expectations. Performance management is not just a silo management practice to monitor or measure the quantitative delivery of staff, a team or a function, but a holistic management discipline which needs to connect many relevant dots such as strategy management, change management, culture management, and people management to involve development, enablement, and enhancement.

The digital paradigm shift represents the next stage of business maturity which will improve how the enterprise works and interacts with its ecosystem. Reinventing the future of business takes both vision and strategy; it’s about setting out goals and working at them in a systematic way for proactively disrupting outdated mindsets, processes, technologies, or cultures, etc. It takes multifaceted approaches to unlock digital performance and catalyze change. Companies should experiment and learn, run, grow and transform business consistently and harmoniously.

Vanity - using measures devised solely to make managers look good or encourage people gaming the measurement data. Performance management is never just about numbers, and measurement is not for its own sake. The goal of measurement management is about providing guidance to help improving future decision-making and action taking. If the management manipulates numbers to make themselves look good or encourages people gaming the measurement data, it will mislead stakeholders, contaminate business culture and diminish multidimensional business value. It’s also important to explicitly communicate the intention behind metrics and make sure that the well-defined set of metrics can enforce information-based communication and lead to continuous improvement.

Provincialism - letting departmental boundaries dictate performance measures. Every function within the company perhaps has their own set of performance measurement. But ultimately, performance measurement and management should focus on achieving the strategic goal of the company, not just the individual, team, or functional performance, but to ensure the business as a whole is superior to the sum of pieces. Provincialism will enforce the silo wall and cause unhealthily internal competition. Also, don’t just scratch the surface to manage the numbers, always understand the whole story behind the scenes. The performance measures need to motivate teams to achieve more, and functional measurements should be directly aligned with the strategic goal of the business  so that top business executives would keep track of the key business success factors for ensuring the seamless strategy execution.

Narcissism - measuring from your own point of view instead of the customers'. It is undoubtedly dynamic time, every forward-thinking organization intends to run a customer-centric business. In reality though, measuring via convenience - from an inside-out operational management lens is still the common practice in many companies. The consequence is that the business keeps spinning, without improving customer satisfaction or increasing the brand value of the company. Metrics need to evolve to something that matters to the internal users or end customers, at the same time that “customer sentiment” needs to get put into something more tangible. Both quality and quantity measures are important because shipping the wrong products on time and within a budget doesn’t benefit anybody, particularly the organization. Companies need to understand the maturity of customer-centric performance measurement practices at the overall organizational scope. The goal is to develop or improve related business competency for improving customer satisfaction.

Egotism - assuming you know what’s important to measure. The problem with measurement is that more often, the metric is very subjective. People have different opinions on how to measure or how to read the measure, or overall how to make it work. Egotism might lead to ego-centricity which is a behavior that is motivated by a belief that one's ego is of greater importance than others' are. Like many other management disciplines, Performance Management is a collaborative effort, it’s important to keep communicating and take a systematic approach, put the cohesive effort into getting the correct measurements, collecting the relevant information, analyzing it, evaluating it, and determining what needs to be improved. Humble attitude and scientific methodology are both important. It's fair to say any organization that didn't have a systematic approach to measurement and analysis at both the strategic level and operational level has a giant blind spot that is impairing their performance.

Pettiness - measuring only a small portion of what matters because you’re fixated on details. Keep in mind performance measures are stories, not just data, financial indicators in many business situations only cover part of the story. Neglect to measure something important will create blind spots for business management to make effective decisions or drive progressive changes with speed. Measuring only a small portion of what matters stops the management from seeing the full picture of what’s going on in the business and limits their view on how to accelerate business performance and unleash its full potential. Ideally, your measures should cover all areas that contribute to business value creation including service quality, employee engagement, business competency, customer satisfaction and financial outcomes. to ensure that the measures are both qualitative and quantitative, and implement whatever mechanisms you need to be able to gather the data and improve performance management effectiveness.

Inanity - measuring the wrong thing causes bad consequences flow: Wrong selection of performance measures could get the devastating effect to the business because it distracts the management to get the right things done effectively, or even causes the long term damage by fixing the wrong problems or encouraging poor behaviors. To avoid the pitfall of measuring the wrong things, people in the organization need to know and understand why the data are being collected and analyzed, as well as what decisions will be made based on the data. The one way to find out that the performance measurement setting is ineffective is by looking at the behavior and culture the KPIs are driving. If behavior and culture are off, and politics is becoming more and more dominant, then you know that performance indicators are perhaps just not the right one to achieve business effectiveness. Even if you choose the right KPIs, you must change them from time to time accordingly. Otherwise, your business is going to be driven by that specific set of KPI even the business circumstances have changed a while ago. It will decrease business effectiveness and decelerate business speed.

Frivolity - this happens when leaders don’t take metrics seriously. It is important to track the right metrics and know what to do with them for making performance improvement by taking a step-wise approach. Fundamentally, the management needs to determine why they are doing it, which strategic business goals or objectives are they trying to reach, as well as how to make things happening. Performance metrics should directly link to the ultimate business goals they want to achieve at the strategic level. From a performance management perspective, a balanced scorecard helps business executives laser focus on understanding critical business issues in a tangible way and determining to fix issues effectively. A well-defined scorecard should contain a good mix of long-term strategic value measures along with performance drivers to keep track of the progress in the short term operational value in spite of capturing multiple perspectives, to enforce a healthy “measure - understand- improve” performance cycle.

Performance Management is not a bunch of paperwork, but a combination of management approaches leading to constantly improving business results. Performance management should take a multidimensional approach, to connect all important dots with multifaceted perspectives. Select the right set of indicators of business improvement, innovation, and investment, really focus on key metrics that correlate to better business outcomes and measure them effectively.