How do you measure the performance of a business book?

Posted on | February 29, 2012 | No Comments

Today* stores start selling our book—misLeading Indicators: How to Reliably Measure your Business. It has been a while coming. It’s natural for us as authors to wonder how it will “perform”.

Many of our acquaintances wonder too, and ask us how we expect it to perform. Their indicators are usually sales or royalties.  Those are obvious and natural indicators. But they are not what drove us to write it.

We have seen a lot of problems with business performance measurement—problems that sometimes caused business failures, huge losses and even serious accidents.  These problems were frustrating to us and we wanted to play some small part in providing a positive influence to correct them.

Photo: Lurii Davydov/Shutterstock.com

At the same time, Green was impressed by how many of his clients—on several continents—had the Balanced Scorecard and similar books on their book shelves.  Obviously they were interested in business measurement, and some had done a lot to implement performance measurement systems. But these books do not tell their readers how to determine whether they can trust their measurements and indicators—hence our book.

A relevant performance indicator for the book (and for us) would have to have something to do with the influence of the book. So perhaps:

• Number of managers who have misLeading Indicators on their book shelf.

The problem with that indicator is that some people—and it’s hard to tell how many—buy books but do not read them.  So here is another attempt:

• Number of people who read misLeading Indicators

Well, that one is pretty hard to measure. And it’s pretty sure there will be some (uncountable number of ) people who read the book and do little about it. Perhaps it would be better to measure

• Number of companies that implement the ideas in misLeading Indicators

But how do you adequately define, let alone measure, “implementation.” Hmmmm…..

One key point of our book is that you have to strike the right balance between the measurable and the un-measurable. It is a mistake to rely too heavily on quantification and overlook vital, but unmeasurable, information.

Perhaps the most important indicator to us of the performance of the book will be the stories people tell us  (and their friends and colleagues) about how the book influenced something important in the way they run their business, and how that helped.

But for that to happen, it has to sell, and people have to read it, and think about it, and do something about it…starting with YOU!

*February 29, 2012

© 2012 Greenbridge Management Inc.

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