business reporting

Any small business leader wanting to implement a dashboard can find dozens of examples via a simple Google search. While many of these dashboards may be gorgeous representations of data with fancy looking charts like gauges, when I look at them it is not clear to me what conclusions I should draw from them. If I am a leader of a business then I want to know how the business is doing and what we need to do to get better. My philosophy is that standard periodic business reports should tell a story about the business. This means knowing not only the “what” but the “why” and the “how” as well.