You Are What You Measure

I was overwhelmed by the TV screens hanging over each group of employees’ heads.

Kyle Porter, CEO of SalesLoft, invited me to visit and meet Rob Forman, his technical co-founder. Most recently, their last funding round valued the business at a $1b pre-money. Back when I visited him at the Atlanta Tech Village, they had twenty employees and were aiming to achieve $1m ARR, annual recurring revenue.

As he walked me around the three open rooms stuffed with young people sitting at lunch tables, I kept seeing all these TV screens. Every one of them was actively being updated with numbers in a spreadsheet format. 

“What are these for?” I asked.

“We measure everything. Any process, any activity, for anyone. We know, and so does everyone else, what everyone is doing. It doesn’t matter if you are an SDR aiming to set appointments for our AEs, or you are a programmer writing code on an enhancement to our software. We have performance goals, due dates, and milestones. We track it all,” he explained. 

I didn’t tell Kyle at the time, but when I left his office, I was intimidated. Maybe even a bit overwhelmed. I couldn’t imagine working in an environment where everything I did was measured against my goals on a minute-by-minute basis and shown to everyone.

I thought back to the way we managed when I was running my startup back in the early ‘80s. We had none of this instant tracking. We had daily review meetings, but the activities of our employees were far less quantifiable. The discussions focused on the activities of the day and how the employee assessed his progress to goal. More subjective than objective.

It was baseball that made me a believer.

Recently, I’ve been listening to the biographies of legendary baseball players. My first was Lou Gehrig. It was so enjoyable, I continued on with Babe Ruth, Bob Gibson, and, most recently, Yogi Berra. I find the stories of these top performers inspiring. They were incredibly talented, passionate about playing baseball, and dedicated at becoming better every day.

But they were also always aware of their stats. They knew where they stood after every at bat or, in Bob Gibson’s case, after every pitch. Everything they did was recorded and measured. Batting average, on base percentage, singles, doubles, triples, home runs, strikeouts, walks, errors, hits, steals, batting with men in scoring position, their best pitch to hit, awards, and, yes, even salary and bonuses.

So it hit me.

You get better at what you measure. 

Measurements, although seemingly harsh, work. There is more to a person than his stats. This is one of the reasons I like reading these biographies. I want to know about these men. To learn about their upbringing, parents, and friends. To find out when they learned they loved baseball, the struggles they had in life, how fame and failure affected them, and finally, how they decided to end their careers, a difficult transition we all have to make at some point in our lives.

But these men are all in the Hall of Fame because of what they achieved. What was measured. They were the best at what they did, not because they said so. They were great because their statistics proved it. Their numbers, compared to the thousands of other baseball players who played the game, proved them to be far superior. And it is their numbers, and their numbers alone, that moved the sportswriters to cast their vote and make these men Hall of Famers. 

So Kyle was right. 

Every one of our jobs, all of our work, can be measured. And what we choose to measure, we will excel at. So if we want to be top performers, this is the only way to get there. This measuring, along with peer sharing, keeps us focused on what is most important in our lives. What should be most important in our lives. 

We can do this as sons and daughters, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, grandparents, writers, artists, professionals, pastors, business people, programmers, and entrepreneurs. Yes, all our stories are interesting. But only the best of the best make the Hall of Fame. 

As my old boss, Sterling Williams, a public company CEO, once told me, “It is all about the numbs.”