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“[I know of] employees who plan ahead to sit next to their CEO on a five-hour flight to bend his or her ear, thinking it will boost their career.  Don’t do it! Again, it’s an example of doing the wrong things right, which will only harm your career.” — Jeffrey Fox

The phrase “doing the wrong things right” came up in in my phone interview with best selling business author Jeffrey Fox for an article available on this blog.  And if I recall our conversation correctly, someone really did do the ‘annoy the CEO for five hours on a plane’ tactic, thinking it would help their career. It didn’t.

I Googled “doing the wrong things right” and found a very interesting blog, The Effective CIO by Chuck Musciano, and a very relevant article Right or Wrong? Well or Poorly? (One quibble: for Chuck’s chart (see left) accompanying his blog post, it is the “doing the wrong things right” quadrant that should be red; doing the wrong things with relentless speed and efficiency is the worst of all possible worlds!)

From Chuck Musciano’s post:

Doing the wrong things right is often known as “paving cowpaths.”  Some awful business processes are so entrenched that they cannot be rooted out.  Discretion being the better part of valor, we choose to automate bad processes, throwing good technology at a bad system.

Hear, hear!  But how do such awful business processes come into being in the first place?  I suggest those ‘cowpaths to hell’ were paved with good but badly misguided intentions, using misguided information. 

I think the key cause to “doing the wrong things right” from a BI perspective is clearly traceable back to “measuring the wrong things right.” 

While browsing the plentiful BI blogs on the BEyeNetwork, I came across a recent posting by business perfomance management expert Craig Schiff.  I have read many of Craig’s insightful articles, but a recent blog posting of his led me to concern over “measuring the wrong things right.”  Specifically, Craig wrote:

The holy grail of business performance management (BPM) is to compensate people based on their achievement of corporate, departmental, and individual goals and objectives. While BPM is good at measuring progress against objectives, it is of little value if it doesn’t change people’s behavior, which in turn should help improve the bottom line. Incentive compensation based on what is being measured by the BPM system is a way to do that.

It is true that setting incentives will change employee behavior, but unfortunately not as often for the better as one might imagine.  I have major concerns with the concept of widespread, heavily incentive-driven compensation, based on the certain data measures tracked by a BPM/BI solution…

First, who decides what the “right” measure(s) are?  I just read a noteworthy article by Amy Domini, founder and CEO of Domini Social Investments, a mutual fund company emphasizing ethical investing.  Amy Domini argues quite convincingly that “[only] what’s published gets measured, and [only] what’s measured gets evaluated and improved.”  When certain select measures – typically financial performance and worker efficiency – are utilized to evaluate business performance, a whole host of other very important measures will go unmeasured…with unforseen detrimental changes in human behavior in the offing; aka, “doing the wrong things right.”

Domini elaborates in her article Digging into the Data in Ode Magazine, May 2009 (p.40; article not online, but other related articles are) that some companies are already proactively reporting not just what their results are (i.e., profit and loss) but also how they are doing it, sustainably, safely and ethically (further reading: Global Reporting Initiative).  Most companies do not do this, of course.  Meanwhile, for example, Japanese companies must report greenhouse gas emissions, but usually report “per unit” emissions, not emissions in the aggregate.  Sony, however, is voluntarily reporting this much more relevant statistic, believing (correctly, I think) this transparency will strengthen its public image.  Another compelling example: Some detective work by Domini’s team disclosed a disturbing increase in worker fatalities for some European cement manufacturers, which had, not coincidently, withheld this data for certain years. 

Now I will draw on my first blog entry on the need to apply business wisdom when using the tool of business intelligence, referencing Barry Schwartz’ inspiring TED Conference talk. Schwartz had high praise for hospital janitors who made wise (also subjective) decisions in deferring or redoing work tasks, in the best interests of patients and their familes. But a misguided hospital facilities supervisor might use BI to “measure the wrong things right” (on-time performance of janitorial tasks in the name of worker efficiency), and in so doing encourage a wrong change in behavior; namely encourage janitors to absolutely, positively complete all tasks as planned as fast as possible (through rule enforcement or incentives), without considering the adverse effects on patient care and compassion.  The result: doing the wrong things right. 

Now consider how the altruistic janitors’ work decisions Schwartz described might have changed for the (much) worse, as a result of being measured - even rewarded! - by how “well” you do the wrong things right! (And those janitors – probably the hospital’s best workers – who are unwilling to, in effect, act against the best interest of patient care, would no doubt eventually quit).

So how can organizations measure and do “the right things right”?  I got an idea on this recently from a business friend of mine, who does not yet even know that he and his company gave me the idea!  I will blog about this in “part 2″ next week – the link is right here!

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