One of “Morris’ 75 Immutable Laws of Life and Business,” reads like this:

“People lie … Numbers (generally) do not.”

And while I am not, and by any stretch, impugning the integrity of any of my former or even current employees, it is much easier to, for example, “get through” a staff meeting when the sum and substance of your report to management is anecdotal, rather than empirical.

I doubt that I will ever forget the light bulb that went off when I arrived at the point in my young career where I truly understood the words being uttered by one of my early-career mentors, “Measure results, not activity.” I was 22 years old and the youngest person in a twelve-person organization when I heard that aphorism and man, did it make sense! Prior to that particular curtain going up, I would approach staff meetings with complete trepidation --- fear, even. My memory is understandably fuzzy, it being nearly four decades since I heard my guy pronounce those words, but I know that at least once or twice I became physically ill just by knowing that I had to confront my sales manager, a guy almost twenty years senior to me, about his "progress" (or lack thereof) towards closing new business.

I guess it would help if you knew that this guy was a master orator and story-teller. He had the ability to convince me that the sky was red and the oceans pink. In the game of persuasion, he was both King and Knight.

In those days, I thirsted for knowledge when it came to finding out about better ways to run my business. (For you younger readers of this column, please understand that in the 70's and 80's there simply were no radio shows like “The American Entrepreneur” - shows that spewed wisdom about starting/buying, and then growing and exiting a business. Nor were there college-level programs in entrepreneurship, such as we have today at Duquesne University. The cold hard reality was this; if you wanted to learn how to build a company, you just had to go out and build that company.)

So, I would badger, beg, and even sometimes berate any successful owner or President I could get my hands on (there were no "CEO's" in the 60's and 70's --- if you became President - you became KING), pleading with them to please help me learn "the tricks" to running a small business.

One of those tricks was getting an overview of the processes and activities in my own business. Frankly, this was one of my most vexing problems, as I oftentimes would come away from meetings, both formal and "in the hallway", not knowing whether we had a project under control or a sale successfully made, or even if our books were being kept properly. I just never seemed to know, "where we were" on any of these projects; neither could I find anyone who could tell me where we were. In truth, I was getting WORDS, and not FACTS from my departmental managers ... and because of this, I was making some very, VERY bad decisions.

A gentleman who was very helpful in solving my "data deficit" problem was a fairly quiet but also very effective operations manager for the same company that I had previously worked for. We'll just call this guy "Richard"'. One day, once Richard and I knew that we could completely trust each other, he took me by the arm and said, “Ron, you're not quite 23 years old and green as hell and your guys are completely outflanking you. You have to TAKE CONTROL! So instead of just being in awe of the fact that guys OLDER than you now REPORT to you, you have to find ways to make them PRODUCE! So, I recommend that you start to make them report in numbers, not words. Study their workflows and then reduce every single activity that they perform to numbers. Then, measure and compare those numbers week-over-week. In a very short amount of time, you’ll start to get much closer to the real truth about who is getting results for your organization.”

"Manage by the numbers", I rolled the very thought of this around in my head, "What a concept!" I got angry for a while. Here I was with a college degree and (at that time) half of a master’s degree and not even one of my professors had ever said to me, “Manage by the Numbers.” I cooled off a bit. "Maybe this was just too obvious, and so maybe they felt like it didn’t even need to be said," I argued with myself. Once I realized the fact that I really had no idea as to why I was running a million dollar company by the seat of my Pierre Cardins I just came to the conclusion that "why" I was here wasn't even important. What was important was that I had to find ways to get away from this insane method of managing. Our staff meetings were basically "Ground Hog Day" --- weekly re-runs of long, rambling commentaries, presented in "blank verse" (apologies, Mr. Shakespeare) by Production, Operations, Administration, and Sales "Managers". Each week, each of these managers would, and in turn, basically tell their story just like it WAS a story, providing very little in the way of hard facts or hard data.

I immediately went to work instituting systems and procedures that made hard, numerical facts an integral part of each manager’s presentation. I did this by first going to each of their departments and asking them to “walk me through” the steps related to the performance of their assigned tasks. In essence, I learned the processes for each department which in turn laid bare the base activities that transformed potential buyers into customers.

For example, I learned that my marketing team "delivered" prospects to the salespeople by employing a standardized process that started with a somewhat qualified “suspect” and ended with a “customer.” In between, there were definable and repeatable tasks to be performed. Among these tasks were such activities as: “suspect qualification,” “suspect elimination,” “prospect qualification,” and, of course, “prospect elimination.” Every one of these activities required time and effort by someone. I very quickly learned that by counting up the numbers of phone calls and conversations with both prospects and suspects tended to yield a pretty fair forecast of forthcoming sales dollars. This was especially true if the prospects and suspects being queried were true “economic buyers.”

So, when we had our meetings under this "regime", money began to flow. Moreover, our people seemed to be much, MUCH happier in their work. This in turn led to even MORE sales, with successful businesspeople now coming right to our front door! And whereas in the past my sales manager would pretty much “tell stories” about the accounts that he and his people were chasing, now he was required (no bonuses were paid unless the system was fully utilized) to engage everyone in a transparent process. No more secrecy!

From the moment we deployed this measurement system, our meetings moved along much more quickly and efficiently; but more importantly, our performance measures (which were now SO much easier to gauge) in just about every category went up. I know this was due to the fact that by defining each and every activity in the relevant process, our managers were forced to look at and then eliminate those activities. It was amazing how many activities we had been performing despite the fact that their successful performance had almost ZERO impact on the completion of the task.

I know that this management concept is already known by many of the people right now reading this column. I also know that I’m not going to get a lot of people to read a column with the (both dry and lifeless) title, “By The Numbers,” . BUT ... you probably would be surprised by just how many companies actually fall into the trap of allowing their managers to report their progress by using a narrative, non-numerical system.

Think of it … how does one truly assess the “forward progress” of any human endeavor sans-quantification/measurement of that endeavor? You can’t. Say you rely on a manager to tell you how your organization is doing at the end of week one. “We’re really doing just great,” is a typical response of a typical entry-level organization that simply just doesn't KNOW any better. Nonetheless, there is your Week One report.

Then, and in week two, you ask the same question and you get this answer, “Oh, WOW --- we're just knocking them out-of-the-park now. We’re doing terrific!”

I ask you --- Just what in the name of the devil does this mean? Of course, it means nothing. It’s frankly just a way to get through a meeting without really having thought through the process or analyzed the progress.

If you’re running your company (or even your life for that matter) without employing hard data to measure progress, you’re doing both yourself and your business a tremendous disservice. Frankly, you quiet simply will just not succeed with this approach. You cannot.

And so if this is the case, I sincerely urge you to sit down right now with each of your department managers and go through each and every department and each and every process. Once you capture those processes (in writing --- ideally using traditional flowchart language and technique), work with that manager and his/her subordinates to precisely define (again, in writing!) each and every activity and the ways that you will measure those activities.

And a few months from now, you and your brain-trust will wonder how you ever ran your company any other way!