The NYT (registration required), has an interesting article about GM's recovery. A good quote from Terry Woychowski, director of G.M.’s vehicle engineers:

“We measured ourselves ten ways from Sunday,” he said. “But as soon as everything is important, nothing is important.”

Moral: Be very judicious in determining what your KPIs are. "Nice to have" is not even close to being the same as "must have".

A bad signal-to-noise ratio slows down decision making.