Myopic performance measurement...

How many times have I seen this before?  No names of course.

The irony of this cartoon is that the "employee" may in fact be correct.  Granted that a revenue chart with this kind of drastic drop-off can't be good, we too often pay these one-dimensional measurements too much attention.

It is like the analogy of the airline pilot sitting behind his cockpit dashboard with all but the altimeter covered up.  When asked by a (nervous) passenger, he responded, "Oh that?  This week I'm really concentrating on managing my altitude better... next week I'll work on airspeed".

How many times have you seen organizations look myopically at a single indicator, often inciting drastic management decisions and policies? 

Organizations in today's competitive environment need a much more balanced view of their corporate health, taking things like customer perspective, internal processes and knowledge/skills and abilities development into consideration with financial indicators.  Sound familiar?  This is exactly the approach taken by The Balanced Scorecard, which has unfortunately of late, been associated more with software vendors (and their management dashboards) than then original methodology written by Robert Kaplan and David Norton more than fifteen years ago.

(Cartoon Courtesy Charlos' Toons @ www.CharlosToons.com ... NOT used by permission (yet), but I hope it's okay!  By the way Charlos, you should consider creating an RSS feed to further syndicate your work on the web.  I see this cartoon via The Vancouver Sun, but taking a page from Dilbert the reach you can get from a web-based syndication (RSS) will soon far surpass the success of the newspaper syndication.)