METRICS MATTER: HOW TO MEASURE SUCCESS AND HAPPINESS IN BUSINESS
The following is an excerpt from Buy1GIVE1 Founder Masami Sato’s latest book, Giving Business. It’s available for sale on Amazon.
We measure many things in life and business – our weight, the time, spreadsheets and statistics.
We measure things in order to have a clearer perspective, to allow us to make sense of our world and our performance in it.
But we can easily end up measuring the wrong things and therefore managing the wrong things too.
Consider this simple example:
Let’s say your goal is to become healthy. There are so many things you can measure. You can choose to measure your weight, blood pressure, energy level, or physical strength. There are a thousand things you could measure to possibly indicate your health status. But considering just one of these figures alone may not give you a clear perspective about the real status of your health, because all these conditions are interconnected.
Measuring certain things and then reacting to the findings might even work against you.
Modern day societies generally encourage you to measure many things that are not so relevant to your real happiness and lasting satisfaction of achieving great things.
Many people count the number of friends they have on their social media accounts. But by being glued to the screen, they may have forgotten to measure the quality of relationships they have with the actual people around them.
Business is no exception. Your perception of the work you do and what you choose to measure and manage can make the difference between feeling disconnected from your business–i.e. feeling like your business is just a normal business–and feeling consistently enthusiastic about where your business is headed and what it is achieving.
THE ONLY WAY TO REALLY ENJOY THE GAME OF BUSINESS IS TO FIND MEANING IN IT THAT MATTERS TO YOU.
And that depends on the lens through which you see the world. You set your own goals, targets and objectives in your business. These things are under your own control.
If you are in a wellness business, then you can set a goal to create as many happy people who are content with their own bodies and wellbeing as possible. If you are in book publishing, you can aim to spread positive stories to as many people as you can.
AND IF YOU DON’T FEEL RIGHT ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL DISTRACTIONS YOUR INDUSTRY IS CREATING, THEN YOU CAN TARGET THE NUMBER OF TREES YOU PLANT AND PROTECT TO COUNTERACT ANY NEGATIVE CONSEQUENCES.
Then, perhaps, you could design better systems and processes to advance your mission – your own meaning – by understanding the stories right there presented in the data you have collected.
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