Relevance: Hitting Your Goals by Knowing What Matters

by David Apgar

In this groundbreaking book, business guru David Apgar helps leaders pinpoint which information matters most for successful goal setting, strategy, and bottom-line performance. Based on simple and easy-to-implement practices, Relevance outlines a new discipline focused on the relevance of performance measures for assessing key strategy issues and accelerating learning. David Apgar’s practices are grounded in solid business research and clearly illustrated with real-life examples from top-performing companies such as Toyota, Alcoa, Nestlé, Capital One, Cisco, Microsoft, and GE.

224 pages, Hardcover

First published April 4, 2008

Reviews

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is book is really worth reading if you want to shake up the way you think about measuring performance and choosing indicators to guide decisions, whether in a business (the focus of this book) or an organization or probably even personal career goals.

The main point I took from it is a provocative definition of what makes an indicator "relevant" to policy or strategy decisions - if the indicator has a good chance of surprising you with regard to the basic assumptions behind your strategy, then it is relevant. The contrast with common approaches to measuring performance - with 100s of indicators to track every input and output - is instructive because, with one clean slice, it shows why that kind of "requirements for success" tracking can rarely help you improve. Only indicators that can help you test your underlying hypotheses about how to produce profit (or development or reduce poverty?) can really help you better performance.

I would have given it 5-stars for the ideas but gave it three stars because it was so difficult to read. Part of that was the writing style, but I also may have been handicapped by not knowing the references in the business literature. Still, quite worthwhile. I'd like to see it redone more crisply, say, the way Atul Gawande writes.