A liberating look at the real reasons organization-wide improvement efforts fail and how, when all attempts have failed, you can help your organization to become great. As the authors of this eye-opening new work make clear, to enact real change, organizations need to shake off their immaturity and grow up. Shifting away from the tendency to lay all the blame on bad leadership, Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little: Overcoming Organizational Immaturity offers specific answers for why most organizational improvement efforts fail. Why Organizations Struggle So Hard to Improve So Little explains the difficulties and dangers of organizational immaturity, then provides proven, effective tools and ideas for achieving change within the limitations of an immature organization. With this guide, leaders and other stakeholders will be able to determine the maturity level of an organization, get beyond prevailing myths about how change gets derailed, and identify potential areas for improvement. Includes assessments, policy framework plans, training plans, strategic plans, and other skill-building documents Offers a bibliography with references to contemporary business improvement thinkers and key research into the likelihood of improvement failures Provides a comprehensive index for easy and quick identification of areas of interest

Learn how to measure success at the individual and organizational levels. By measuring success in multiple dimensions using multivariate methods you will be able to determine what works and what doesn't. The key is to measure and promote progress in terms of organizational vision, mission, and overarching goals. Business leaders too often succumb to the working assumption that they only have to show shareholders and boards of trustees that they are turning a profit-the higher the profit, the more successful their stewardship of the company. Wrong! To truly thrive and endure, all organizations-corporate, government, small, large, nonprofit, or startup-need to define and pursue the underlying purpose for their existence. To measure success, leaders today are missing a key meta-analytic in their toolbox. In this book, metrics consultant Martin Klubeck provides it to them. Success Metrics steps you through the process of identifying and combining the right measures to gauge, narrate, and guide your organization's progress toward true success. All organizations have a common goal to be successful. All leaders want to make data-informed decisions and use measures to improve processes, communicate progress, and gain support. The problem is that proxy or partial measures don't measure overall success and can be misleading. They measure performance parameters, progress on a specific task, customer feedback, and other piecemeal indices-which taken separately fail to describe an organization's progress toward overall success. The author's integrated measures of success can be used to communicate organizational progress to stakeholders, shareholders, boards of trustees, corporate leaders, the workforce, and the customer base and thereby galvanize broad commitment to organizational success. Klubeck shows how his principles and methods of measuring overall success can be applied at all levels: individual, team, group, department, division, and organization. What You Will Learn: Understand why you should measure success instead of performance Understand what to measure and what not to measure Integrate the measures of success to tell a complete story Share measures of success with different audiences Who This Book Is For Organizational leaders at all levels from the executive suite to middle management, analysts and consultants who are tasked with designing metrics programs for organizations, individuals interested in adapting the author's framework to measure overall personal success in multiple dimensions

Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn't it be great to have a simple explanation of how to collect, analyze, report, and use measurements to improve your organization? Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does the book explain the why of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process for creating a report card that provides a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way - the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. The report card provides a simple tool for viewing the health of your organization, from the outside in.You will learn how to measure the key components of the report card and thereby improve real measures of business success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising.This book: * Provides a step-by-step guide for building an organizational effectiveness report card * Takes you from identifying key services and products and using metrics, to determining business strategy * Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise, including IT What you'll learn * Understand the difference between data, measures, information, and metrics * Identify root performance questions to ensure you build the right metrics * Develop meaningful and accurate metrics using concrete, easy-to-follow instructions * Avoid the high risks that come with collecting, analyzing, reporting, and using complex data * Formulate practical answers to data-based questions * Select and use the proper tools for creating, implementing, and using metrics * Learn one of the most powerful methods yet invented for improving organizational results Who this book is for Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results was written for senior managers who need to improve key results.Equally, the book is for the department heads, middle managers, analysts, IT professionals, and change agents responsible for collecting, analyzing, and reporting metrics. Finally, it's for those who have to chase data and find meaningful answers to the interesting questions executives ponder. Table of Contents * Introduction: Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How You Use Metrics * Establishing a Common Language * Where to Begin: Planning a Good Metric * Using Metrics as Indicators * Using the Answer Key * Start with Effectiveness * Triangulation: Essential to Creating Effective Metrics * Expectations: How to View Data in a Meaningful Way * Creating and Interpreting the Metrics Report Card * Final Product: the Metrics Report Card * Employing Advanced Metrics * Creating the Service Catalog * Establishing Standards and Benchmarks * Respecting the Power of Metrics * Avoiding the Research Trap * Embracing Your Organization's Uniqueness * Appendix: Metrics Tools to Use and Useful Resources

Metrics are a hot topic. Executive leadership, boards of directors, management, and customers are all asking for data-based decisions. As a result, many managers, professionals, and change agents are asked to develop metrics, but have no clear idea of how to produce meaningful ones. Wouldn't it be great to have a fast, simple explanation of how to plan for and then design measurements to improve your organization? Planning and Designing Effective Metrics-an abridged version of author and metrics expert Martin Klubeck's Metrics: How to Improve Key Business Results-provides that explanation and the tools you'll need to make your organization more effective. Not only does this brief book explain the "why" of metrics, but it walks you through a step-by-step process to create a clear picture of organizational health and how well you satisfy customer needs. This book: Provides a guide for planning and designing useful metrics based on your unique organizational needs Offers the theory behind metrics to help you get exponentially better practical results Shows how to select and use the proper tools for creating, implementing, and using metrics Provides examples of how to identify, collect, analyze, and report metrics that will be immediately useful for improving all aspects of the enterprise Planning and Designing Effective Metrics will help you to measure the right things, the right way-the first time. No wasted effort, no chasing data. You will learn how to create valuable measures of organizational success, like repeat customers, customer loyalty, and word-of-mouth advertising. That will help you not only to improve organizational results-you'll also multiply your career opportunities.