not particularly useful to give you situ- ational awareness about what’s going on, because we usually measure the wrong things and we draw incorrect conclu- sions. I’ve found that the metrics we use are generally very bad at giving you a good understanding of what’s going on. But they are good for one thing: Metrics drive activity. Once you start measuring something, people will start generating activity. I tell people, everybody wants their bar to be green. In other words, if you put up a PowerPoint chart and you put up a bar …, people will say, “If you’re going to measure that, I want that bar to be green.” Nobody wants to be amber or red, and God forbid you’re ever black. So you say, “You know what? Maybe I need to start measuring things differently, measure different things.”
If you want to measure rate of innovation, what is a good metric? I was talking to [an executive of] a Fortune 50 company recently … about innovation, and I said,
“So, how do you all measure innovation?” He goes, “Well, one of the things that we do is that we measure the rate of failure of new startup programs, so, new ideas.” Tis is kind of a high-tech company. He said, “Once we fall below 70 percent, we know we have a problem, if we fall below 70 percent failure.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “If 50 percent of the ideas people come up with actu- ally go into production and work out, then they’re not pushing the envelope enough. In other words, I want people to get out there on the edge, and if they’re really out on the edge thinking through stuff, a lot of this stuff, a lot of it won’t pan out. … We find that if 30 percent succeeds, it really succeeds, beyond our wildest dreams.
“If we get lower than that, people are being too cautious, they’re too comfort- able, they’re not taking enough risk.”
CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO
Perkins talks to TRADOC civilians about the new AOC, the future of the Army and what it means to be a professional, during a professional development session Nov. 4, 2014, on Fort Eustis, VA. “We design and build the Army. TRADOC changes the Army—that is what we do. Our job is not to maintain the status quo,” he told the audience. (Photo by Chris Thompson)
Tis is a company that’s well-known for really pushing the envelope and com- ing up with game-changing stuff. What you don’t know is that for every three [concepts] that went to market and now change the face of the world, seven are on the cutting-room floor. How about if, in the world that you and I live in, we went to Congress and said our goal is to make sure 70 percent of the good ideas we start fail? I’m not sure that would go over well.
But maybe one of the things to start measuring, as an Army, is not how many programs of record did we complete—I know this is almost heresy—but how many programs of record did we cancel because they were becoming obsolete, and then took that money and put it into a new startup that started as a new idea. Where we tend to focus now is on, “Is your program on time, is it within budget,
is it near completion?” What we’re mea- suring is your compliance with the status quo. Tat’s what we measure.
What we ought to probably start measur- ing is innovation. … How much stuff did you stop doing because it was a good idea 10 years ago but is no longer a good idea, and we’ve taken those resources and put them into something nobody even thought was possible 10 years ago? Where is that graph? … You have to define suc- cess differently. You have to measure different things if you want to change. If you want to change something and you keep measuring things the same way, why do you think anything will change?
ARMY AL&T: Do you have current and emerging technologies in mind as poten- tial opportunities?
ASC.ARMY.MIL
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CRITICAL THINKING
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