Performance Measurement

view media player

Personal Insight

One of the concepts that is truly essential if you really want to have a high performance organization is the concept of continuous improvement. It's almost a cliché but it really is something that the culture has to embrace, and it really has to manifest itself in everyday behavior. The notion is that 'I've got to figure out a way to do something a little bit better today than I did yesterday', and if you can foster that in the culture of your organization, great things happen.

A big part of it is how you benchmark your results. For many, many years as a private company, Domino's really benchmarked against themselves without looking at the outside world. We were very proud of the fact that for many years we had positive same-store sales, which is a really big financial indicator of growth and success in the retail world. Well, that was the good news.

The bad news is that during those same years our competitors were growing at a faster rate. So, we were actually giving up market share. At the same time, we were hosting internal celebrations about the fact that against our own internal metric we were doing well.

We not only had to look at what had been our past results and reconcile how we were performing against that benchmark but we also needed to look at the world around us, look at our competitors and in many instances I really wanted us to look at the very best in class. Who is out there doing the best possible job in this particular area of business? Find out what their results are and start to hold ourselves accountable for that particular level of performance.

We accept mediocrity because we can choose a lot of people around us who are just as mediocre as we are. I want to find the very, very best and I want to benchmark against them, and I want to get as good or better.

I think if I lead that expectation and I get my team and my organization to embrace it, that's how we're going to become world-class performers.