We all know hard work doesn’t guarantee results. So many organizations generate great ideas but can’t execute them. Smart leaders with the best intentions stay stressed out and frustrated by a lack of improvement. And as the business world gets more complex, these problems get worse. Mark Graban explains why the management methods we were taught don’t work. The data-driven decision-making techniques in this book will stop you from confusing activity with progress and—finally—get things done.

Mark has hit another home run with this work. Measures of Success is the book that everyone who is serious about improvement needs to read. It provides clear, actionable, and essential guidance to the art and science of measurement that will guide your improvement efforts and ensure that you don’t waste time obsessing over irrelevancies. Your management team — and your front line workers — will thank you for learning the lessons contained in this book.

Be a better leader by distinguishing what is noise from what is important. This book outlines in understandable terms the complex world of performance measurement.

When I encountered Don Wheeler’s 'Understanding Variation' and 'Making Sense of Data' early in my career, it was eye-opening. Now, Mark Graban’s 'Measures of Success' offers an engaging and practical guide on how we can use Process Behavior Charts to keep our eyes open and focused on the information that matters to our success. 'Measures of Success' is a worthy successor to Wheeler’s work and an essential addition to any Lean or Six Sigma learning library.

Mark's book is a great introduction to how get more out of your performance data. Building on the great work by Don Wheeler and others on Process Behaviour Charts (PBCs). Mark adds a contemporary context that highlights many of the common errors that leaders make when interpreting measures. He explains how the use of PBCs, along with some simple approaches to improvement that he outlines, will significantly increase performance in your organisation. I think this book brings much-needed clarity to this important topic and will be invaluable to anyone seeking to make sustainable improvements to their processes.

While the old cliche that “the numbers don’t lie” may be true, what Mark Graban so insightfully makes clear in his new book "Measure of Success" is that our mental biases and attribution errors can often twist the truth. More importantly, he shows us precisely how to avoid the data interpretation traps that can lead us astray in our attempts to improve our systems.

Disciplined process management is an essential practice for achieving outstanding performance in any organization. Mark has produced an excellent book to help improvement professionals and leaders alike gain clarity about how their processes are actually performing to drive more relevant improvement. Bravo!

Mark Graban taught the KaiNexus team how to understand the story a metric is actually telling over time. We've saved time by not overanalyzing every up and down in our metrics — and that’s valuable time we now put to better use. This new way of thinking also decreases stress, which further helps us do better work. I'm excited that Mark is sharing these lessons through 'Measures of Success,' a book that will help accelerate your progress and lead to better results.