Managers carefully assess what they will measure and how they define it. At Sprint Nextel Corporation, a new CEO discovered that the company was struggling because managers were measuring the wrong things. For example, managers in the customer care department focused on metrics that controlled costs but didn’t solve problems. Consequently, Sprint had a terrible customer service reputation, was losing customers, and wasn’t meeting its financial targets. When Dan Hesse came on board as CEO, he told managers to stop worrying about how long it took for a care agent to handle a call and start focusing on how effectively the agent solved the customer’s problem. Before long, Sprint had moved way up in the consumer satisfaction ratings and was adding new customers.13 In the auto industry, crash test ratings provide a standard of performance established by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.