Top ten reasons for reading misLeading Indicators: How to Reliably Measure your Business

There are many books that tell you what to measure to succeed in a business strategy or to improve business performance. Ideas on what to measure may indeed be very useful. But these ideas won’t help you, and may even be harmful, if you do not know whether what you are measuring is misleading you.

misLeading Indicators reveals the hidden and potentially misleading nature of indicators that can make or break a business.

Here are our top ten reasons you should read misLeading Indicators:

1. It will provide you with four clear principles for determining which indicators and measurements can be trusted, and which mislead; it illustrates these principles with many indicators from across a wide spectrum of businesses and functions.


2. It shows how common measurement clichés (e.g. “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”) and metaphors (e.g. automobile and airplane dashboards) can lead you to make misleading interpretations of indicators.


3. It will show you how to determine whether indicators based on counts are reliable (e.g. inventory, opinion polling).


4. It will show you how to determine whether indicators based on instrument measurements are accurate and precise (e.g. process measurements, temperature).


5. It will show you how to determine whether rankings and ratings are reliable (e.g. customer satisfaction ratings, audit scores).


6. It will show you how people, knowingly or unknowingly, manipulate and modify indicators to make them misleading.


7. It will show you techniques to develop indicators that focus employee efforts and will show how some indicators, by oversimplifying and glitzing up information displays, misdirect their efforts.


8. It will show you how common indicators of time series, such as Statistical Process Control charts, are misleadingly explained, justified and interpreted.


9. It will show you how averages can distort indicators and mislead about the underlying data behind.


10. It will show you why probability, and thus risk, cannot be measured, and why attempts to create measures of risk so often lead to spectacular failures such as mine explosions and business failures.

You can buy misLeading Indicators at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, or direct from the publisher in paper or electronic formats.

Philip Green and George Gabor are co-authors of misLeading Indicators: How to Reliably Measure Your Business, published by Praeger. www.misleadingindicators.com

© 2013 Greenbridge Management Inc.