What the Numbers Aren't Telling You

Business is all about the numbers. Everybody says so, and it's true, with one catch: the numbers come after the cause, even when the dashboard is live, and by the time they move, the cause is months old and somebody has already funded it.

If you wait for the report, you spend the next quarter fixing the number while the cause keeps running. Picture three companies with a bad quarter coming.

• Retention slipped because a head of sales has been quietly working against the new strategy since spring.
• Margin compressed because two founders stopped speaking in March and nobody has said so.
• Growth slowed because the directors lost confidence in management, and management could feel it, and started managing the board instead of the company.

Every process that involves people has mistakes in it. From a systems perspective, the question is how much they matter, and that isn't on the dashboard. A dashboard counts. What the count means is in conversations that never made it into a report.

So when a director calls and says the numbers aren't where they need to be, the useful question is what was already changing before the numbers moved. The answer is nearly always findable in hindsight: a leadership change that didn't take, or a plan the team never believed in. It was visible to somebody, and it wasn't on a slide.

To lead is to sustain a certain measure of self-delusion. The numbers are where it finally runs out. Better numbers come from a clearer picture of what's happening in the company, and most of that picture isn't in any report. Nobody will tell you unless you ask.