Council Post: The Business Metric Most Companies Aren’t Measuring
Jeremy Barnett is a 3x founder and the CEO and Co-founder of RAD Intel.
getty
Over the last year, I’ve noticed a pattern that keeps showing up in conversations with founders, operators and investors. The companies pulling ahead aren’t always operating with dramatically better information.
In many cases, they’re looking at the same market data, the same customer signals and the same technological shifts as everyone else. Yet, they consistently arrive at different conclusions and, over time, produce different outcomes.
I think the pattern becomes more interesting when you look at how most companies measure success.
Most companies have dashboards for everything: revenue growth, profitability, retention, pipeline, productivity. Those metrics are important because they help leaders understand where the business stands. But they all measure the result of a decision that has already been made. By the time a number appears on a dashboard, the decision that created it is often months old. Sometimes years old.
When people look back at companies that successfully navigated a major market shift, the outcome often feels obvious in hindsight. At the time, the path forward was anything but clear.
Information Is No Longer The Advantage
For decades, information itself was a competitive advantage. Companies invested heavily in research, analytics, market intelligence and reporting because access to better information often produced better decisions. Organizations that could see more of the market usually had an advantage over organizations that couldn’t. Now, the economics of information have changed.
AI can summarize research, identify patterns, evaluate scenarios and organize information faster than most teams could have imagined a few years ago. Market intelligence is now more accessible, and analysis is cheaper. The barriers that once separated large organizations from smaller ones continue to fall.
As a result, more companies are starting from similar information than ever before. What leaders do with that information is often where the real differences emerge.
Two leadership teams can look at the same trend and come away with completely different conclusions. One sees a temporary shift. The other sees a long-term change. One waits for certainty. The other starts allocating resources. One sees risk. The other sees opportunity.
That’s why judgment is becoming more valuable at the exact moment information is becoming more abundant.
Why Judgment Matters More Now
Much of the conversation around AI focuses on productivity gains. Those gains are real. Research is conducted faster, analysis happens faster, administrative work happens faster, and organizations can process more than ever before.
What receives less attention is that all of this creates more options, recommendations and possible paths forward. AI can help organizations understand what’s happening, surface possibilities and help model outcomes.
Leadership still has to decide what to do next. The companies that consistently outperform rarely have perfect information. More often, they have a decision-making system that helps them recognize meaningful signals, challenge assumptions, learn quickly and act with conviction when others remain uncertain.
Over time, decision quality goes beyond leadership instinct and becomes part of the operating system of the company.
What Leaders Should Evaluate
If decision quality matters more, then leaders need to spend more time evaluating how decisions are made, not just the outcomes those decisions eventually produce.
How quickly does new information move through the organization? How effectively are assumptions challenged? How consistently does learning from one decision improve the next one? How often are leaders discussing the quality of their reasoning instead of simply reviewing performance reports? Those questions may become increasingly important as access to information continues to level out across industries.
Ultimately, they matter because they shape what appears on the dashboard later. Many organizations spend significant time reviewing outcomes. Fewer spend the same amount of time examining the decisions that produced them.
The Bottom Line
Revenue will always matter. Profitability will always matter. Every business needs accountability and performance metrics. But those numbers primarily tell us what already happened. The decisions behind those numbers deserve just as much attention.
As information becomes easier to access and analysis becomes easier to generate, more organizations will operate with similar tools, similar intelligence and similar visibility into the market. They still won’t make the same decisions. The results will eventually reflect that.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?