In the case of BP, many things went wrong leading up to the oil spill. Rather than asking what mistakes to avoid making again, it's important to ask whether the appropriate metrics are in place to measure real performance.

Four months after a BP oil rig ex ploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing an unprecedented environmental crisis, we know that the spill was the tragic result of numerous management errors. But sometimes knowing what went wrong is not the same as knowing how to fix it.

Just consider the complexity of the oil spill. Thousands of individual decisions were made by thousands of rig workers, managers and executives at all levels of the corporation. Which decisions led to the fatal explosion? How do we make sure that those decisions aren't made again?

The problem might be that these aren't the right questions. Whatever your business, you simply cannot know the consequences of every decision made by your employees. What you can control, however, is measuring their output and whether they are meeting goals put in place by management. So rather than asking what mistakes to avoid making again, I teach my clients to ask whether the appropriate metrics are in place to measure real performance.

The Analyst Magazine, Right Metrics, Management Errors, Environmental Crisis, Wall Street Journal Investigation, Pipeline-Corrosion Inspections, Leak-Detection System, Federal Regulator, Organizational Boundaries, Performance Metrics, Alaska Pipelines.