Ep 426 | What Gets Measured Gets Managed

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. What gets measured gets managed. This is a book or quote that was associated with Peter Drucker, the, the well-known business guru who may or may not have actually said, "What gets measured gets managed," but I love the quote and I wanna talk about it here because I think it's applicable, not just in our business and in our wealth, but in our health and our relationships and all of these other areas. The idea here is that tracking and measuring specific aspects of a business drives better focus, better improvement, or more improvement, and, and greater accountability. This doesn't apply, again, as I mentioned, just in business, but in all areas. So the concept itself stems from a principle that I mentioned was attributed, or oftentimes is attributed, to, to Drucker, who was a management expert. And he argued that if you want to improve something, you first need to measure it. So the philosophy became a foundation in business management and it really emphasized the importance of data-driven, I would say, data-driven decision-making. Again, though, I believe that this applies in all areas of business and life. So the book and the concept overall suggest, number one, that measurement, as we all know, creates awareness. And a big theme here at No Days Off is to be aware. Self-aware, aware of, you know, the pros and cons of a decision, aware of your vision or direction or goals. We talk a lot about awareness. Well, measurement creates awareness. So by measuring key aspects of a business, let's say it's sales or productivity or customer satisfaction, what it does is allow for managers to bring these metrics into the spotlight and therefore help their teams focus on what what's important. The concept also suggests that we have accountability and we have performance tracking. Regularly measuring performance against benchmarks, it creates accountability. It lets people know about their contributions and how they're being evaluated. Ultimately, I think this sort of thing leads to higher performance as we, right, or as team members understand what's expected. And can create some goals that they can work towards. Lastly, I think around this concept of what gets measured gets managed, and I think about not just continuous improvement, which measurement allows for, you know, data-driven insights, and these insights may be to improve or spot inefficiencies and ways to create, you know, greater success. But I also think it aligns with or it pertains to alignment with goals. When the right metrics are measured, they help a company stay aligned with, with its objectives. So for example, if customer satisfaction is a priority, then regularly tracking the feedback we're getting from customers ensures that this goal is continuously being addressed. So I'm talking about this concept though today because I think it underscores the importance of selecting some meaningful metrics, and then regularly monitoring them to build greater focus, greater discipline, and just continuous improvement within your business or other areas. Let's talk about some of these other areas. Things that, you know, we talk about here at No Days Off that deserve to be measured: health, wealth, relationships, career satisfaction, personal growth. I think it's really easy for many of us to default to certain metrics or an understanding of certain metrics in our businesses. But are we creating these metrics and scorecards in these other areas? Let's talk about health, okay? What would be some meaningful metrics that you could track in health? What would be relevant? What would be realistic? And in analyzing these things, create more focused improvement over time. Some things that come to mind for me, maybe it's body composition, things like tracking your weight or your body fat percentage. Maybe it's steps. Many, many of you listening track your steps. That is a great sort of thing to measure because when you measure it, you can manage it. You can take action around it. Sleep quality. What's the quantity of sleep that you're getting per night? The WHOOP and things like that measure sleep efficiency. Or give you a sleep score. These things, again, allow you to measure certain metrics within your health, and you can manage them. I also think not just around physical health, but what about mental health? We could track stress levels. Maybe it's just daily self-assessment on a scale of 1 to 10, or maybe it's number of minutes meditating. Maybe it's number of journal entries. Right. And then of course, there's nutritional health, like calories or water intake or diet quality, like servings of vegetables, let's say. Lots of different things we can measure with respect to our health, and therefore we can manage. How about our wealth? Certainly a big topic here at No Days Off. We can measure monthly income. We can measure passive income. How about measuring income growth rate? We can measure our expenses. We can measure discretionary spending. Maybe we measure our savings rate, or we measure the, uh, the, the savings we're putting towards our reserves, our emergency fund. I know we've talked about measuring net worth and tracking that regularly. There's lots of things you could track with respect to your wealth. Are you doing so? Are you measuring these things such that you bring awareness, and in doing so, you can manage. In relationships, I think about, believe it or not, measuring quality time. How many minutes or hours are you spending with the people that matter most? What's the frequency of contact? How about new relationships or new connections? In the more romantic relationships you may have, What's the time being spent together? What's the quality of communication? Like, how would you rate your communication in, in, in your weekly reflections? How many meaningful conversations are you having per week? Conflict resolution, a big thing in romantic relationships. How often are conflicts resolved positively versus not positively? It's a good scorecard metric. Yes, it's subjective. It's not as objective as all things. But certainly, if we're aware of it and we're measuring it, we can manage it. And in our professional relationships, what are our networking activities? How many events are we attending? How many new contacts, professional contacts, have we made? You can think about all other areas there. In career satisfaction, I think around new skills acquired. How many, how many courses have I completed? How many certifications have I earned? How many skills have I developed? How about project success rates? How many projects am I working on are completed? What sort of contributions are they making to the major company goals? I can measure my work-life balance. How many hours am I working versus my personal time? And how— where do I want to go? How do I stand relative— like, when I measure that, how do I stand relative to where I want to be? And then what sort of management change do I need to make? I think we could take a look at Even motivation, like self-assessed enjoyment or self-assessed fulfillment at work. We could rate these things daily or weekly, and we could measure those. In measuring them, we can manage them. In personal growth, it may be books read, skills developed, goals completed, milestones met, you know, habits created. Lots of areas we can— lots of things we can measure and therefore manage. So today's episode was an awareness episode. What I started with, what we measure, we can manage. I don't necessarily fully agree with that statement from time to time because I think there's actually another book written by John Doerr that's called Measure What Matters. Measure What Matters. And I like that statement because I don't want to measure everything and act like it's all important. Sometimes we can measure things and manage things, and these things don't ultimately end up being important. So I think we have to measure actually what matters. But conceptually, if we are in fact tracking things, we know where we stand. And if we know where we stand, especially on those things that are most important to us, then we can make changes if and when necessary. If you're not progressing at the rate that you'd like to progress in various places within your life, business, personal, wherever it may be, maybe it's because you haven't defined necessarily what success looks like, nor have you defined the metrics to get that, that, that are aligned with the success you desire. Follow me? So, what we measure, we can in fact manage. If it feels over the top to be measuring all these things, try it out. See what bringing that awareness to your net worth or to your body fat percentage, or to your savings rate, or to the number of quality conversations you're having with a significant other. See what happens when you start measuring these things? I just am a firm believer that the more we can put this in front of our face, the more we could be aware and we could see these numbers. You don't have to think about it nonstop, but with greater awareness comes greater action. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.