Reaching New Business Heights with The Dashboard Effect

What is The Dashboard Effect?

In its purest form, The Dashboard Effect  is a company that defines its key performance indicators, and measures their status with real-time, graphical, and highly visible feedback.  Going further, this visible enterprise has the tools needed for efficient and intuitive workflow, has staff who are informed on their performance and the performance of their peers, has easy and effective communications, manages projects in a programmatic way, and has centrally-searchable, anywhere-access to its documents and data.

It is an organization where every employee from the CEO to the janitor knows every day how the company is performing, and how they are contributing to that performance.

Knowledge is Power

Here's a truism:  knowledge makes work less of a mystery, and more knowledge makes work more gratifying.  It empowers employees to succeed by providing a personal, measurable goal and making their performance against that goal easy to find and easy to understand.   It creates camaraderie through healthy competition and by clarifying how individual goals work together to advance the team's goals.  It also gives every manager from the top to the bottom of the organization a simple but powerful tool to measurably influence performance.  The Dashboard Effect doesn't mean that influence trickles down from the top, but that the flow of accountability runs both upward and downward through the organization, improving success and work-enjoyment at every level.

To be sure, implementing visibility may require a cultural shift, but the rewards are profit and sustainability.  The good news is that the tools to create visibility are available to everyone, and implementation is more an exercise in logic and discipline than invention.

Most company owners we speak with are frustrated.  They know their company has inefficiencies and problems that need attention, but can't gain clarity into those problems and can't affect meaningful change when they do.  To that end, the Blue Margin executive team has embarked on writing a book, The Dashboard Effect, to help companies develop a more successful and gratifying work environment.

Stay tuned for more on how your company can become a Visible Enterprise, how you as the owner can finally have clear visibility into your business, into what's working and what's not.  

-The Blue Margin Team