The Saturday screenshot

The number that runs most companies here is not on the dashboard. It fits in a screenshot, and it goes out on a Saturday morning.

Somebody builds the dashboard. It costs money, it takes a quarter, it has a login, a training session and twenty-two tiles. Then a founder wants to know how the week went and receives a photograph of one corner of it in a message. The photograph is the reporting system. The dashboard is the ceremony.

Watch a weekend with a holiday attached and the message arrives earlier rather than later. Egypt's holiday landed on a Friday this year, which is a weekend day anyway, so the week did not really end any differently, and the screenshot still goes out before anyone has had breakfast.

The informality is not the trouble. The crop is.

Whoever sends it decides what to include, and that decision is taken by a person who knows exactly which tile makes their week look like a good week, in a message that will be read once, on a phone, by the one reader who determines what they are worth. So the number that governs the company gets selected weekly by the most anxious person in the chain, and nobody in the building would ever call that a measurement framework.

A better dashboard does not touch it. Neither does a rule against screenshots.

What works is choosing the crop in advance and out loud, with the founder present. This number, every Saturday, whatever it happens to say. One figure, agreed while it is still nobody's fault, that will sometimes arrive ugly and go out anyway.

Otherwise the business is run on a photograph, taken by the person with the most to lose from an honest one.