Tools or Toys?
by Jonathan McGaha | 30 June 2015 12:00 am
A couple of months ago, I got one of those new fitness tracking devices that tracks your steps, measures your heart rate and is designed to help improve your fitness. I had two goals when I got it. One, I wanted to improve my fitness and the other was to take a few pounds off. I also know that I’m the kind of person who performs better with a specific goal, so I signed up for a half marathon in November, knowing it would provide the training structure I needed to improve my fitness.
I believed the device would be an essential part of achieving that goal. There are two things about these fitness devices you should know if you’re planning on acquiring one. First, it won’t go for a run or a bike ride for you. And it won’t send you off to the gym with good intentions. You have to do that yourself. And the other thing to know is that it won’t block your hand from shoveling more food into your gob.
The upshot of starting to use this device is that a couple of months after buying it, I have slightly improved my fitness because I’ve done some training for the race, but I’ve also been eating as if the world were going to run out of food and I needed to use my stomach to warehouse as much as I could. The result? I’ve put on about five pounds. That extra weight is not something I look forward to carrying with me while I run this half marathon.
Those results seem to fly in the face of management guru Peter Drucker’s famous adage about businesses: “What gets measured, gets managed.” I’m measuring my physical activity in ways I never thought possible just a couple of years ago, but a major component of that is declining. And, the improvement I am experiencing is more a result of my attempt to achieve a goal- run a half marathon-than any measuring that’s going on.
We establish systems in our businesses that provide feedback reports on the company’s performance. We track leads and close ratios. We dig into production and variance reports. We measure jobs costs and make sure our current ratio is within industry norms. But we forget about implementing the organizational discipline that makes all that measurement worthwhile.
Without the discipline, my fitness tracker is nothing more than a fancy accessory. It’s a toy, not a tool.
And that’s the central question in managing a business. Are you using your reporting tools as toys? Are you just looking and not exerting true discipline over the company?
New technologies have given us powerful tools generations before us didn’t have that allow us to know our businesses intimately. We can see deep into the darkest nook and understand what’s going on. But I feel that we’ve too often accepted that technology as the disciplinarian of the company and haven’t exerted any real control. That was not an option in the business management world of Drucker’s time. Then, discipline was the first thing managers turned to, and they used the tools they had to ensure that discipline moved the company in the right direction. Now, we look at the tools first, and think that measuring is enough. It isn’t.
I know this because I had to loosen my belt by a notch this morning.
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