What are hard numbers? What are soft issues?
Agricultural raw ingredient ‘hard numbers’ can be ‘top down’ numbers like profitability, sales, operational efficiencies, or they can be ‘bottom up’ numbers like biomarker data, supplier’s opinion polls, truck dump times, number of times your procurement teams talk to their suppliers, GPS coordinates, seed varieties, etc. Hard numbers are important because you can’t improve something if you don’t first measure it. Example of soft issues include: people’s perception of an issue, willingness to accept change, ability to react to new information quickly, ability to lead others and many other relationship attributes, that while difficult to measure, certainly drive the hard number results. We offer up that while more involved to manage, we find that effectively managing the ‘bottom-up numbers’ and the soft issues is an excellent way to effectively, and sustainably drive the ‘top down numbers’.
