HBR Guide to Executing Your Strategy

CHAPTER 18

Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business

by Michael Harris and Bill Tayler

Tying performance metrics to strategy has become an accepted best practice over the past few decades. Strategy is abstract by definition, but metrics give strategy form, allowing our minds to grasp it more readily. With metrics, Ford Motor Company’s onetime strategy “Quality is job one” could be translated into Six Sigma performance standards. Apple’s “Think different” and Samsung’s “Create the future” could be linked to the amount of sales from new products. If strategy is the blueprint for building an organization, metrics are the concrete, wood, drywall, and bricks.

But there’s a hidden trap in this organizational architecture: A company can easily lose ...