Stop Drowning In Data And Start Winning

This expert opinion by Bruce Eckfeldt, Inc. 5000 CEO and strategic business coach, was originally published on Inc.com.

The most common mistake I see leadership teams make is conflating operational excellence with strategic progress. This separation isn’t merely semantic—it fundamentally changes how teams allocate resources, make decisions, and ultimately, grow. So you have to measure these two classes of metrics separately.  

Operational dashboards track internal day-to-day performance—like revenue, profit margins, and customer satisfaction. When it comes to operations, these are crucial metrics, but they measure the effectiveness of your current business model—not your progress toward future competitive advantage.

A strategic dashboard should help leadership monitor progress toward competitive advantage and long-term outcomes, such as share of wallet with ideal customer segments, adoption rates of next-generation products, or development progress on proprietary technologies that will create future barriers to entry.

Follow these tips when building your dashboards:

Align With Your Value Proposition

A strategic dashboard, again, is all about long-term. It should track a small set of well-defined, balanced KPIs that reflect your most important strategic priorities and help you stay focused on future value creation. The goal is to improve decision-making, keep teams aligned, and ensure accountability.

Start by identifying the core priorities that matter most for long-term growth—those that go beyond day-to-day operations and directly support your strategic goals. Then, translate those into measurable indicators.

What makes a metric truly strategic is its connection to your unique value proposition and competitive positioning. The question isn’t just, “Are we performing well?” but rather, “Are we building the capabilities and position that will create sustainable advantage?” This distinction changes everything about how leadership teams allocate their attention and resources.

Keep It Focused And Balanced

The power of a strategic dashboard comes from its selectivity. While operational dashboards might track dozens of metrics, effective strategic dashboards typically focus on 5-9 core indicators that collectively tell a complete story about strategic progress.

This selectivity serves two crucial purposes. First, it forces leadership to achieve clarity about what truly drives future value creation—a discipline that itself improves strategic thinking. Second, it creates focus throughout the organization by signaling what matters most amid countless competing priorities.

The most effective strategic dashboards I’ve helped develop maintain balance across several dimensions: leading and lagging indicators, financial and non-financial metrics, and measures that span different time horizons. This balance ensures that short-term pressures don’t override long-term value creation and that financial outcomes don’t come at the expense of building sustainable capabilities.

Link Strategy To Execution

A well-designed strategic dashboard bridges the gap between abstract intentions and concrete tactical execution. It transforms lofty strategic objectives into measurable, manageable components that teams can act upon and track over time.

This linkage solves one of the most persistent challenges of strategic implementation: connecting high-level direction with day-to-day decision-making. When teams can see how their work directly impacts strategic metrics, they make better prioritization decisions and allocate resources more effectively.

The most successful companies I’ve advised use their strategic dashboards as central alignment tools. They review these metrics in leadership meetings, incorporate them into team objectives, and reference them when making trade-off decisions. This consistent connection between metrics and decisions ensures that strategy drives action rather than remaining a theoretical exercise.

Evolve

Strategic dashboards shouldn’t remain static. As your market evolves, the competitive landscape shifts, and strategic priorities adjust, your dashboard must evolve accordingly. The metrics that mattered during market entry may differ from those that matter during scale-up or maturity phases.

Effective leadership teams review their strategic metrics quarterly to ensure alignment with current priorities and annually to ensure alignment with evolving market conditions. They’re willing to retire metrics that no longer serve as useful indicators and introduce new ones that better reflect changing strategic imperatives.

This willingness to evolve measurement approaches differentiates truly strategic organizations from those trapped by historical reporting conventions. The question isn’t “What have we always measured?” but rather “What should we measure now to guide future success?”

A thoughtfully designed strategic dashboard transforms strategy from an occasional planning exercise to an ongoing management discipline. By focusing leadership attention on the metrics that truly drive future value creation, you create the conditions for sustained, strategic growth rather than merely efficient operations.

Action Items

Here are some questions to help you design your strategic dashboard:

• What capabilities drive our competitive advantage, and how might we measure their development?
• How effectively do our current metrics distinguish between operational performance and strategic progress?
• What leading indicators would give us earlier visibility into our strategic momentum?

Having guided dozens of leadership teams through developing and implementing growth strategies, I’ve observed that the difference between companies that successfully scale and those that plateau often comes down to how well they measure their strategic results. The companies that grow most consistently are those that measure what truly matters for long-term value creation.