Organizational measures are the foundational building blocks that shape an organization‘s vision and action. All too often however, these measures do not receive the attention they deserve. In addition, it is common for organizations to overact and measure too much, resulting in the same results as when you don‘t measure at all a lack of understand

In the spring of 2010, Harvard Business School’s graduating class asked HBS professor Clay Christensen to address them—but not on how to apply his principles and thinking to their post-HBS careers. The students wanted to know how to apply his wisdom to their personal lives. He shared with them a set of guidelines that have helped him find meaning in his own life, which led to this now-classic article. Although Christensen’s thinking is rooted in his deep religious faith, these are strategies anyone can use. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

Working Backwards is an insider's breakdown of Amazon's approach to culture, leadership, and best practices from two long-time Amazon executives—with lessons and techniques you can apply to your own company, and career, right now. In Working Backwards, two long-serving Amazon executives reveal the principles and practices that have driven the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them—much of it during the period of unmatched innovation that created products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was developed and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable. With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels of the company. With a focus on customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence, Amazon’s ground-level practices ensure these characteristics are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business. Working Backwards is both a practical guidebook and the story of how the company grew to become so successful. It is filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how their time at the company affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time. Whatever your talent, career or organization might be, find out how you can put Working Backwards to work for you.

“At last! A book about errors, flubs, and screwups that pushes beyond platitudes and actually shows how to enlist our mistakes as engines of learning, growth, and progress. Dive into The Mistakes That Make Us and discover the secrets to nurturing a psychologically safe environment that encourages the small experiments that lead to big breakthroughs.” DANIEL H. PINK, #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DRIVE, WHEN, AND THE POWER OF REGRET We all make mistakes. What matters is learning from them, as individuals, teams, and organizations. The Mistakes That Make Us: Cultivating a Culture of Learning and Innovation is an engaging, inspiring, and practical book by Mark Graban that presents an alternative approach to mistakes. Rather than punishing individuals for human error and bad decisions, Graban encourages us to embrace and learn from them, fostering a culture of learning and innovation. Sharing stories and insights from his popular podcast, “My Favorite Mistake,” along with his own work and career experiences, Graban show how leaders can cultivate a culture of learning from mistakes. Including examples from manufacturing, healthcare, software, and two whiskey distillers, the book explores how organizations of all sizes and industries can benefit from this approach. In the book, you'll find practical guidance on adopting a positive mindset towards mistakes. It teaches you to acknowledge and appreciate them, take necessary measures to avoid them while gaining knowledge from the ones that occur. Additionally, it emphasizes creating a safe environment to express mistakes and encourages responding constructively by emphasizing learning over punishment. Developing a culture of learning from mistakes through psychological safety is essential in effective leadership and organizational success. Leaders must lead by example and demonstrate kindness to themselves and others by accepting their own blunders instead of solely pushing for more courage from their team. This approach, as Graban highlights, fosters a positive and productive work environment. The Mistakes That Make Us is a must-read for anyone looking to create a stronger organization that produces better results, including lower turnover, more improvement and innovation, and better bottom-line performance. Whether you are a startup founder or an aspiring leader in a larger company, this book will inspire you to lead with kindness and humility, and show you how mistakes can make things right. Table of Contents: Chapter One: Think Positively Chapter Two: Admit Mistakes Chapter Three: Be Kind Chapter Four: Prevent Mistakes Chapter Five: Help Everyone to Speak Up Chapter Six: Choose Improvement, Not Punishment Chapter Seven: Iterate Your Way to Success Chapter Eight: Cultivate Forever Afterword End Notes List of Podcast Guests Mentioned in the Book More Praise for the Book ”Making mistakes is not a choice. Learning from them is. Whether we admit it or not, mistakes are the raw material of potential learning and the means by which we progress and move forward. Mark Graban's The Mistakes That Make Us is a brilliant treatment of this topic that helps us frame mistakes properly, detach them from fear, and see them as expectations, not exceptions. This book's ultimate contribution is helping us realize that creating a culture of productive mistake-making accelerates learning, confidence, and success.” TIMOTHY R. CLARK, PHD, AUTHOR OF THE 4 STAGES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SAFETY, CEO OF LEADERFACTOR

#1 New York Times Bestseller Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth—and how it can help any organization thrive. In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress—to measure what mattered. Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked. In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization. The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention. In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.

An accessible, clearly organized survey of the basic topics of measure theory for students and researchers in mathematics, statistics, and physics In order to fully understand and appreciate advanced probability, analysis, and advanced mathematical statistics, a rudimentary knowledge of measure theory and like subjects must first be obtained. The Theory of Measures and Integration illuminates the fundamental ideas of the subject-fascinating in their own right-for both students and researchers, providing a useful theoretical background as well as a solid foundation for further inquiry. Eric Vestrup's patient and measured text presents the major results of classical measure and integration theory in a clear and rigorous fashion. Besides offering the mainstream fare, the author also offers detailed discussions of extensions, the structure of Borel and Lebesgue sets, set-theoretic considerations, the Riesz representation theorem, and the Hardy-Littlewood theorem, among other topics, employing a clear presentation style that is both evenly paced and user-friendly. Chapters include: * Measurable Functions * The Lp Spaces * The Radon-Nikodym Theorem * Products of Two Measure Spaces * Arbitrary Products of Measure Spaces Sections conclude with exercises that range in difficulty between easy "finger exercises"and substantial and independent points of interest. These more difficult exercises are accompanied by detailed hints and outlines. They demonstrate optional side paths in the subject as well as alternative ways of presenting the mainstream topics. In writing his proofs and notation, Vestrup targets the person who wants all of the details shown up front. Ideal for graduate students in mathematics, statistics, and physics, as well as strong undergraduates in these disciplines and practicing researchers, The Theory of Measures and Integration proves both an able primary text for a real analysis sequence with a focus on measure theory and a helpful background text for advanced courses in probability and statistics.

Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are measures of how patients feel or what they are able to do in the context of their health status; PROs are reports, usually on questionnaires, about a patient's health conditions, health behaviors, or experiences with health care that individuals report directly, without modification of responses by clinicians or others; thus, they directly reflect the voice of the patient. PROs cover domains such as physical health, mental and emotional health, functioning, symptoms and symptom burden, and health behaviors. They are relevant for many activities: helping patients and their clinicians make informed decisions about health care, monitoring the progress of care, setting policies for coverage and reimbursement of health services, improving the quality of health care services, and tracking or reporting on the performance of health care delivery organizations. We address the major methodological issues related to choosing, administering, and using PROs for these purposes, particularly in clinical practice settings. We include a framework for best practices in selecting PROs, focusing on choosing appropriate methods and modes for administering PRO measures to accommodate patients with diverse linguistic, cultural, educational, and functional skills, understanding measures developed through both classic and modern test theory, and addressing complex issues relating to scoring and analyzing PRO data.

In 1997, Congress, in the conference report, H.R. 105-271, to the FY1998 Energy and Water Development Appropriation Bill, directed the National Research Council (NRC) to carry out a series of assessments of project management at the Department of Energy (DOE). The final report in that series noted that DOE lacked an objective set of measures for assessing project management quality. The department set up a committee to develop performance measures and benchmarking procedures and asked the NRC for assistance in this effort. This report presents information and guidance for use as a first step toward development of a viable methodology to suit DOE's needs. It provides a number of possible performance measures, an analysis of the benchmarking process, and a description ways to implement the measures and benchmarking process.