Glossary
Cadence
Cadence is how often a number gets read out and answered for, and it is a property of the meeting rather than of the metric itself. Weekly, monthly, quarterly. Choosing the wrong one is the most common reason a measurement habit dies in month three, because a number that cannot be produced weekly turns the meeting into a round of apologies.
01
Choosing weekly, monthly or quarterly for a row
The Scorecard is weekly by design, and rows that cannot keep up belong somewhere else. A rough figure available every Monday beats an exact one available on the fifteenth of next month, because only the first can change what the team does. Margin, turnover and anything waiting on the accounting close go to the monthly review.
Cadence decides how many chances you get to fix the same problem inside a period. A weekly number gives four. A monthly number gives one, and it arrives after the month is spent. The other half of the rule is honesty: a row that shows up two weeks in three teaches everybody to ignore the whole board, so cut it or find a cheaper version of it.
Worked example: An architecture practice tried to run utilization weekly, but the figure depended on timesheets that closed on the tenth. Three months in, the row was blank more often than not. They replaced it with hours booked into next week's schedule, which one person could read off the calendar on a Friday, and moved true utilization to the monthly review.
Sources: Traction, Gino Wickman, chapter on Data; kpi.org/kpi-basics/dashboarding-and-analysis
KPI
A KPI is a number a leadership team has agreed to run the business by: one owner, a goal written next to it, and a slot on the weekly agenda.
02Trailing 13-week view
A trailing thirteen-week view keeps a quarter of history beside the current number, so one bad week reads as noise and a repeated miss reads as a pattern.
03Metric owner
A metric owner is the single person who answers for a row every week, which is not the same as the person who happens to have access to the report.
04Meeting Pulse
The Meeting Pulse is the fixed rhythm of meetings EOS® asks a company to keep: the same weekly leadership meeting, a full day each quarter, two days a year.
05KPIs: what they are, how many to track, and which matter
A practical guide to key performance indicators for small companies: definitions, leading vs lagging measures, examples by department, and how many to track.
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