Break out the spandex and big hair - it's time to define your key performance indicators

It's hard to believe that the big hair behind such classics as Jump and Panama could be the basis for a lesson in performance measurement. But Van Halen, and David Lee Roth, are just that.

You've probably heard the story about Van Halen insisting that there be no brown M&Ms backstage. But what you may not have known is that it wasn't (just) the band acting like rock & roll divas; it was actually an ingenious performance indicator.

David Lee Roth explained the clause in the band's rider in his auto-biography:

Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets.

We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors — whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. [...] So, when I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl . . . well, line-check the entire production.

Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error. They didn’t read the contract. Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.

Sometimes it would threaten to just destroy the whole show. Something like, literally, life-threatening.

So next time you're trying to explain to a group of managers that you don't need to know the number of emails they sent last week, you only want performance data that gives an indication of the state of affairs -- try tossing on Hot For Teacher, and challenging them to find the brown M&Ms in their own programs.

Read more about Van Halen and the brown M&Ms. Check out Dan & Chip Heath's book: Made To Stick!

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/143/made-to-stick-the-telltale-brown-mampm.html