Page 97 - Everything I Know About Business I Learned

Standards

urement is everything. If you are part of a system and it is not
judged, well then, it’s whoever can talk the best or manipulate the
best that will win. In a system with standards and that has judg-
ment on those standards, the truly best will rise to the top.”
The system’s emphasis on measurement became evident to me
early on in my career. From the hourly readings to the daily sales,
to how many bags of potatoes were used in a day, measurement
was clearly an early lesson for all of us. It allowed an unbiased,
objective look at how the operating system was doing. It sounds
simple, but my experience has shown me that the process is far
more uncommon than you might think. As a consultant today, I
am constantly working with organizations to integrate metrics
into their goals to allow for accurate review of their perform-
ance. So far, I have not found a task that I could not measure,
and as former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani famously
said in a New York Times article, “If you can’t measure some-
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thing, then you cannot manage it.” He should know. Under his
watch as mayor of New York City, along with William Bratton,
his police commissioner at the time, Giuliani took a simple pro-
cess and revolutionized police performance. CompStat (COM-
Paritive STATistics) is the accountability process that the
department has been using since 1994. By measuring on a timely
basis and by holding the precinct commanders accountable, and
redeploying resources as needed, the amount of crimes in each
precinct has dropped significantly. It serves as a model that any
organization can adopt. Simply put, establish the goal, hold peo-
ple accountable, work collaboratively to achieve goals, measure
the results in a timely manner, and recognize the success. The peer
pressure to perform is leveraged in this exercise to its fullest.
McDonald’s used this competitiveness and the spirit to challenge
each other to a great degree of success.
At McDonald’s, we learned about the importance of meas-
urement early on in sales, in profits, in customer counts, in turn-