Measurement Madness

A clearer, more accurate performance management strategy Over the past two decades, performance measurement has profoundly changed societies, organizations and the way we live and work. We can now access incredible quantities of data, display, review and report complex information in real time, and monitor employees and processes in detail. But have all these investments in collecting, analysing and reporting data helped companies, governments and people perform better? Measurement Madness is an engaging read, full of anecdotes so peculiar you'll hardly believe them. Each one highlights a performance measurement initiative that went wrong, explains why and – most importantly – shows you how to avoid making the same mistake yourself. The dangers of poorly designed performance measurement are numerous, and even the best how-to guides don't explain how to avoid them. Measurement Madness fills in the gap, showing how to ensure you’re measuring the right things, rewarding the behaviours that deserve rewarding, and interpreting results in a way that will improve things rather than complicate them. This book will help you to recognize, correct and even avoid common performance measurement problems, including: Measuring for the sake of measuring Assuming that measurement is an instant fix for performance issues Comparing sets of data that have nothing in common and hoping to learn something Using targets and rewards to promote certain behaviours, and achieving exactly the opposite ones. Reading Measurement Madness will enable you to design a simple, effective performance measurement system, which will have the intended result of creating value in your organization.

A clearer, more accurate performance management strategy Over the past two decades, performance measurement has profoundly changed societies, organizations and the way we live and work. We can now access incredible quantities of data, display, review and report complex information in real time, and monitor employees and processes in detail. But have all these investments in collecting, analysing and reporting data helped companies, governments and people perform better? Measurement Madness is an engaging read, full of anecdotes so peculiar you'll hardly believe them. Each one highlights a performance measurement initiative that went wrong, explains why and - most importantly - shows you how to avoid making the same mistake yourself. The dangers of poorly designed performance measurement are numerous, and even the best how-to guides don't explain how to avoid them. Measurement Madness fills in the gap, showing how to ensure you're measuring the right things, rewarding the behaviours that deserve rewarding, and interpreting results in a way that will improve things rather than complicate them. This book will help you to recognize, correct and even avoid common performance measurement problems, including: Measuring for the sake of measuring Assuming that measurement is an instant fix for performance issues Comparing sets of data that have nothing in common and hoping to learn something Using targets and rewards to promote certain behaviours, and achieving exactly the opposite ones. Reading Measurement Madness will enable you to design a simple, effective performance measurement system, which will have the intended result of creating value in your organization.

This second edition of the popular math teaching resource book Math Stories for Problem Solving Success offers updated true-to-life situations designed to motivate teenagers to use math skills for solving everyday problems. The book features intriguing short stories followed by sets of problems related to the stories that are correlated to the standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Each of the easy-to-read stories is followed by three increasingly difficult groups of problem sets. This makes it simple for teachers to select the appropriate problem set for students of different abilities and at different grade levels. To further enhance student involvement, the stories feature recurring characters and can be used either sequentially or out of order. The problems in the book cover many basic math topics, including decimals, fractions, and percents; measurement; geometry; data, statistics, and probability; algebra; and problem solving. In addition to having all the answers, an Answer Key at the end of the book offers explanations and background information about the problems that can be helpful to both teachers and students. Math Stories for Problem Solving Success will help you show students that math is something they are already using every day.

Follows students' natural progression from measuring with informal or non-standard units to using standard units to measure such attributes as length, weight, angle and temperature. Activities extend students' learning to the measurement of two-and three-dimensional objects. Students work in a variety of lively real-world contexts, gathering measurement benchmarks in a classroom scavenger hunt and investigating the area of a rectangle while acting as owners of a sticker factory, for example.