Measure What Matters

Gerry House

Superintendent
Memphis City Schools
Memphis, Tennessee

The business of schools is to educate children. And the way we know whether children are being educated is by measuring how well they do on tests. I look closely at scores from the state's standardized test. Every year, the test compares how well our children are performing with the performance of children across the country. But I also look at other tests, such as writing assessments.

The way to improve test scores is to improve not students' test-taking ability, but the fundamentals of what and how we teach. When I came to Memphis, I sat down with the school board and with members of the community to reflect on two questions: What do children need to learn during their 13 years of school to become successful citizens in the 21st century? And what must schools do to help students acquire that knowledge?

We made a firm commitment at that meeting: to hold all children to the same standards, regardless of their family situation. Our teachers have clear standards for what kids need to know in each subject, and they are accountable for the performance of every child they teach.

Gerry House became superintendent of the Memphis school system in July 1992. The system, which has implemented whole-school reform (a nationwide restructuring effort), has 162 schools and serves more than 112,000 students. In 1999, house was named National Superintendent of the Year by the American Association of School Administrators.

Charles Digate

Chairman, president, and CEO
MathSoft Inc.
Cambridge, Massachusetts

Of all the numbers that we measure, two are especially important to me. One -- how many PhDs we have on staff -- shows how smart we are. The other -- the percentage of our revenue that comes from e-commerce -- indicates how fast we can grow. The education level of our staff is important because we're not your average software company. Our products have a lot of unique content: They contain mathematics and engineering formulas as well as statistical algorithms. The number of highly educated people whom we have on board directly affects our product quality.

Also, a well-educated staff helps attract other highly educated people. I believe that MathSoft has a higher ratio of PhDs to total employees than any other software company. We employ about 170 people worldwide, and we have about 45 PhDs. So it's no surprise that smart, highly trained people feel good about working here -- or that customers believe that MathSoft has something special to offer them.

I track the share of revenue that comes from e-commerce because our business focuses on engineers, scientists, and students. Besides being large, that market is fairly mature. A great many of our customers -- engineers, especially -- have already acquired tools from us or from other companies. As a result, our growth rate in that area has slowed.

Right now, for example, 1.3 million people use our products. That's up from 1.1 million users last year. This year, we'd like to add several hundred thousand more customers. So we're looking to the Internet to generate new growth -- by selling our classic products to new customers and by adding online services and subscription-based businesses.

Charles Digate, Before he joined MathSoft, was a senior executive at Lotus Development Corp. and the founder of Beyond Inc. MathSoft provides a broad range of technical-calculation and analytical software for business and academia. hundreds of giant companies, more than 500 government agencies, and 2,000 academic institutions use its products.

Ron Wolf

Executive vice president and general manager
Green Bay Packers
Green Bay, Wisconsin

The nice thing about our business is that there's one universally recognized measure of success: winning the Super Bowl. My job is to develop metrics that tell us how close we are to that goal and whether we're moving closer to it.

Football is an exciting business, and it can be cold-hearted. But it's also a pretty simple business. It all comes down to how our team stacks up against the other 30 teams in the league. But we pay attention to the other 4 teams in our division: the Chicago Bears, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the Detroit Lions, and the Minnesota Vikings. I pay special attention to the Vikings, last year's division champion: I look at how our team matches up against theirs on the field. Where are their strengths and weaknesses, and where are our strengths and weaknesses? What do we have to do better if we want to topple them?