Burgess COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Peter Burgess 2:37 PM (5 hours ago) to Brian Gately

Dear Brian

I enjoy getting your periodic updates about the MicroFinance community. As you know I was pretty active in this arena some time back but not recently. This is a matter of managing priorities and budgeting limited money, time and energy.

I am always on the lookout for the theme in the presentations and specifically whether metrics has any role in what presenters have to say. Mostly metrics are missing, and to the extent that they do feature, the metrics in play are those that are in my view problematic.

Peter Drucker, the famous management guru used to say that 'you manage what you measure' and I am completely on-board with that idea. I have also been known to say that if you change the way the game is scored, you change the way the game is played.

In microfinance, when more mainstream financial players became engaged the metrics of microfinance started to have focus on money profit, interest rates and financial returns. It was not too long after this that all sorts of stories started to surface about the bad social impact that microfinance was having while looking good for a financial perspective. For someone like me with a history of using metrics for management, this came as no surprise. We measure the money flows, we do almost nothing to measure social impact (or for that matter environmental impact)

As long as we measure only for money performance ... the world will continue on a trajectory that ends in disaster.

I see reform in the area of metrics as being absolutely vital for a future that works.

I did a seminar for MILE a couple of weeks back ... not particularly slick, but a start. MILE is the Madinah Institute for Leadership and Enterpreneurship in Saudi Arabia.
http://blog.mile.org/how-to-manage-for-best-triple-bottom-line-performance/

I am trying to lay out the whole concept of comprehensive metrics in a somewhat accessible way using slideshare. This is very much a work in progress ... but potentially a way to make a complex subject reasonably accessible. The link gets to navigation that leads to the various slidesets in slideshare. http://www.truevaluemetrics.org/DBadmin/DBtxt001.php?vv1=list0200-Burgess-p3-Slidesets

Please keep me on your mailing list for your fantastic messages

All the best

Peter