A kid gets 5 marks out of 10 in an exam. In the same school it is mandatory for the teacher to ensure that all the students get minimum of 7 marks, else she would be questioned. What is the option before the teacher….and the easiest one? Even if the student gets 05 marks, she can make it 07. This would save her from embarrassment and while she would have prevented herself from questioning, the fate of the student can be easily predicted, he became weak and weak and weak.

The other option would have been, the teacher spends more time with the kid, understand why he finds the particular subject difficult, talks to his or her parents, guides and coaches him to excel and perform better.  The result, in the  next exam, he may get 06 and in the next finally more than 7. Now this going without saying that it would indeed take more time, effort and pain. Neither most of the teachers nor the schools seem to have patience. Instant results is the mantra. 

A good number of organisations are caught up in this, what i call, the METRICS conundrum. 

Just look at some of the cases. ” The Indian subsidiary of Swiss drug maker has dismissed some 18 middle-level sales executives for fabricating and inflating the sales numbers of its diabetes drug Galvus, a news report said.

Novartis sales representatives used the sales incentive provided to them by the company to buy stocks from wholesalers and show a spike in the sales of the drug in order to meet their targets, a report in business wire magazine PharmaAsia News said ” 

Consider another case, The former executives of ADIDAS are formally under investigation over allegations that receipts were falsified, Reebok merchandise was siphoned off, Adidas-owned goods were hidden in four different warehouses and that goods were sent to fake distributors, two investigators told the Financial Times.

In both the instances, inquiry is going on. Now why does this happen? Just ponder for a moment.  I feel it is an ever increasing instance of trying to meet the expectation of Principals of Indian subsidiaries to grow the business month on month and each and every parameter. Metrics is good as long as it really tells and reflects  the true health of the company. If the health of the company is not sound, the metrics cannot be realistic, somewhere something is cooked….Leadership teams to sometimes resort to the easy way of managing the metrics rather than work on improving the process.

This is killing the organisation and a new breed of professional are in demand, those who can manage metrics. Executives are not being allowed to focus on the process improvement. Hence, although by managing the metrics, some of the organisations are meeting the demands of stock market and investors, yet in the long run they are making the organisations weak by not focusing on the processes.