Every week, someone in your organization calls a meeting to explain a number.
The number went up. Or down. Or missed the target by a few points. And so people gather, data gets presented, reasons get offered, and action items get assigned.
Then next month, it happens again.
Most of the time, nothing actually changed. The process was the same. The people were the same. The variation was just… normal. But because nobody had a way to tell the difference between a real signal and routine noise, the organization reacted anyway — and called it management.
That’s what this book is about.
Stop Reacting to Noise.
Start Responding to Signals.
Measures of Success shows business leaders how
What Measures of Success actually teaches
Not how to hit your targets. Not how to build better dashboards. How to look at a metric and know — with confidence — whether something actually changed, or whether you’re just watching a stable system do what stable systems do.
That distinction sounds simple. In practice, most organizations never make it. Which means they spend enormous amounts of time and energy reacting to things that didn’t need a reaction — while the things that do need attention stay buried in the noise.
Process Behavior Charts are the method. They’re not complicated. No statistics background required. If you can plot points on a chart, you can do this. What they give you is a shared, visual language for asking the right question: is this a signal worth responding to, or isn’t it?
That question tends to change meetings.
Three questions worth being able to answer
After reading this book, you’ll be able to answer these for any metric in your organization:
Are we achieving our target — consistently, or just occasionally?
Are we improving — and can we predict where we’re headed?
When should we act, when should we wait, and how do we know the difference?
Most leaders can’t answer the third question with any confidence. This book fixes that.
Who this is not for
Leaders who use metrics primarily to hold people accountable for outcomes they don’t fully control. The methods here are designed to help you understand your system — not to sharpen the tools you use to pressure people.
Who this is for
Leaders and teams who rely on metrics to make decisions — in healthcare, manufacturing, software, government, or anywhere else performance gets measured and discussed.
It’s particularly useful if you’ve ever sat in a meeting where someone reacted strongly to a single data point, and you weren’t sure whether the reaction was warranted. That feeling is the gap this book addresses.
Praise for Measures of Success
Zeynep Ton
, Author of The Good Jobs Strategy
Eric Ries
“By combining a range of case studies and stories across industries, including many from his own personal experience, with detailed, clear explanations of what Process Behavior Charts are and why they’re so effective for managing data, Mark Graban has written a readable, informative book to guide any leader who wants to help an organization achieve true and lasting success. Improvement has been made easier thanks to his work.”
Hi. I’m Mark Graban.
I’ve spent more than two decades working with leaders in healthcare, manufacturing, and technology — helping teams improve their work and make better decisions with data. What I kept seeing was smart, well-intentioned people reacting to noise and calling it improvement. This book is my attempt to give people a better way.
Other books by Mark: Lean Hospitals, Healthcare Kaizen, Practicing Lean, The Mistakes That Make Us
See my website MarkGraban.com
Mark at Lean Startup Week
Watch a 15-minute talk on separating signal from noise:
View the full 15-minute presentation
Buy Measures of Success
Get a Sample Chapter!
Frequently Asked Questions
Not at all. The method is straightforward, and the book walks you through it step by step. If you can plot points on a chart, you can do this.
No. The examples span healthcare, manufacturing, software, startups, and government. The method works anywhere people use metrics to make decisions.
Absolutely. Many readers teach these methods to their teams. The charts create a shared, visual language for discussing performance — which tends to replace opinion-driven debates with better conversations.