The Last Word: Readiness beats past performance.
It is still considered good management to hit your numbers. Revenue targets met, costs controlled, margins protected, the dashboard glowing green, the board reassured that performance is on track. It all looks sensible, disciplined, even impressive. And yet more organisations are discovering, usually later than they should, that they can meet every target they set for themselves and still move steadily towards irrelevance.
That is the trap. We still measure success as though the world were stable enough for the past to guide the future. It is not. Most KPIs are backward-looking by design. They tell you what happened, how efficiently you delivered it and whether you performed against assumptions that were made at an earlier point in time. They are useful as records. They are far less useful as a guide to survival.
That would matter less if changing conditions were occasional. They are not occasional anymore. They are constant, layered and increasingly hard to predict. Every day brings a new shift in technology, politics, markets, public expectations or behaviour. In that environment, the comfort of performance data can become deeply misleading. You can be doing very well according to yesterday’s logic while becoming dangerously exposed to tomorrow’s reality.
Read Andrew Wrobel’s full Last Word column at Reinvantage.
Photo: Dreamstime.