What Gets Measured Gets Done

red yellow green charts

What Gets Measured Gets Done

red yellow green charts

There are apps for almost everything. Some wonderful. Others less so.

Several of the apps play to the recently created insecurity in us all – the strange desire to get “Likes.” These apps are designed to make you strive to boosts the number of approvals your posts receive. Which begs the question: Who cares?

Are Likes Your Worth?

Teenagers and millennials, mostly. What these apps and Facebook and Instagram have discovered is that people see Likes as a measurement of their worth. Yes, it’s absurd. But they look at the numbers daily and, in some cases, nearly every minute. And this response causes them to post more and seek more Likes. They try to find pictures that will elicit a greater number.

As ridiculous as it is, the teens are reacting to a natural stimulus: “What gets measured gets done,” a phrase often recited and attributed to many philosophers of business. It works on teens and young adults in the world of social media, and it works on men and women in the world of business. We don’t always seek Likes, but we sure enjoy growing numbers. And we cringe when the numbers go down.

Most adults recognize that measuring Likes is unhealthy and, as a million parents have opined, “A complete waste of time.” Similarly, businesses need to carefully consider what it is they need to measure.  In some cases, an outside source can best cut through the clutter and identify what should be measured and how.

What We Can Learn

But here’s where we can learn from the “Like” craze: When you reward a result, it gets repeated. The same adrenaline that runs through a 15-year-old girl who gets 800 Likes for the picture of her purple hair flows through the veins of a salesman who gets an immediate payoff for a close. Too many businesses wait until things have broken down and gone into repair mode. Be aggressive. Be strategic.

The technology is there to measure Key Performance Indicators and display them like a live scoreboard. We use a specific display like this to measure our weekly client satisfaction rate, our weekly progress towards our service level objective goals and our support engineers’ weekly utilization. But it can be tailored to handle a variety of variables. What do you need to measure? What should you measure?


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Matt Hyatt

About the Author – Matt Hyatt is the Founder and CEO of Rocket IT, the IT department for all kinds of organizations around Gwinnett. His award-winning firm provides both the strategy and support needed to help businesses thrive.

Matt currently serves on the Executive Board of the Gwinnett County Chamber of Commerce as the Vice-Chair of Entrepreneurship & Small Business is an active supporter of Gwinnett County Public Schools, and is a member of several peer groups (like Entrepreneurs’ Organization) in addition to co-founding two of his own. In 2014, Matt was awarded the Pinnacle Small Business Person of the Year. 

Outside of work, Matt enjoys spending time with his wife, Maureen, and their two teenage children pursuing their shared passions for photography, travel, and food. He also regularly runs with a team in ultra-long distance relay races.

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