ExpertActions helps leaders who believe their organizations could be more effective but aren't sure which areas to focus on for improvement.

How do you know if your corporation is performing as well as it could be? How can you identify its relative strengths and weaknesses? We rely on two tools:

• Decision scorecard. The best measure of overall performance is ability to make good decisions, make them quickly and execute them effectively, all without too much (or too little) effort. We use what we call a decision scorecard to assess how your corporation is doing compared with competitors and peers. The scorecard includes all the elements of decision effectiveness and charts your performance on each one. It allows you to benchmark the results against ExpertActions's database of more than 33,000 organizations around the world.
• Organizational scorecard. Once you know your overall score, you need to know which elements of your organization are contributing to decision effectiveness and which are getting in the way. So the second part of our assessment creates an organization scorecard. This scorecard evaluates your structure, processes, incentives and many other elements, helping you home in on the barriers to better decision making and execution. These scores, too, can be benchmarked against other organizations in ExpertActions's database.

To perform these twin assessments, we typically survey a broad cross-section of people, including those on or close to the frontline. We then flesh out the survey data, where appropriate, with supplementary information from interviews or group discussions, "X-ray" analyses of decisions that have gone well or badly and so on. The benchmarks help companies identify their most critical issues and highlight opportunities for improvement. Just as checking the bathroom scale can launch you on a weight-loss program, the assessments alone often have a galvanizing effect on an organization.

How does your organization score? Take the quizzes to get a quick impression of how a structured assessment of decision effectiveness might improve the quality, speed and effort of your company's decisions.

Measures & Incentives

• ExpertActions helps companies create dynamic performance measurement with a focus on what really matters to the business. We build dashboards that serve as barometers of ongoing business performance and help companies devise tailored compensation systems that will reward actions and behaviors that advance the organization's goals and drive decision effectiveness.
• Top performers use aligned measures and incentives to keep people pointed toward growth. Typically, the most effective organizations avoid overloading on metrics, taking care instead to measure what matters. A few dozen key metrics will often serve to measure most of the economic value of the business, allowing management to focus clearly on company and individual performance.
• Well-run companies typically translate company goals and metrics into performance objectives for individual managers and employees. Then they hold these managers and employees accountable for delivering on their objectives. Firms must take action to ensure that objectives and incentives truly support effective decisions within the organization. Two ways to do this are to tie objectives and incentives to sources of value and link a significant portion of objectives and incentives to shared goals.