Ack! The scorecard's gone red!

Andy Mulholland has a nice post over at the Capgemini CTO blog, which points out that we have a strange aversion to the colour red. Having red on your balanced scorecard is not necessarily a bad thing, as it tells you something that you didn’t know before. Insisting on managers delivering completely green scorecard is just throwing good information away.

Unfortunately something’s wrong with Capgemini’s blogging platform, and it won’t let me post a comment. Go and read the post, and then you can find my comment below.

Economists have a (rather old) saying: “if you don’t fail occasionally, then you’re not optimising (enough)”. We need to consider red squares on the board to be opportunities, just as much as they might be problems. Red just represents “something happened that we didn’t expect”. This might be bad (something broke), or it might be good (an opportunity).

Given the rapid pace of change today, and the high incidence of the unexpected, managing all the red out of your business instantly turns you into a dinosaur.