“You don’t even have to make profitability a KPI,” says Veejay Madhavan. “That’s just basic hygiene.”
For someone who spent decades as a corporate CEO, Veejay is disarmingly blunt about the sacred cows of corporate performance. Among them: Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.
“We get financial KPIs like revenue and margins,” he continues, “but if the company isn’t profitable, no one has a job. That’s fundamental. That should be a dashboard item, not a KPI.”
He says current numbers often miss the point – not because numbers don’t matter, but because the people acting against those numbers are not aligned and equipped to succeed. As the founder of Oulbyza consulting firm focused on building high-performing, multi-generational teams in the age of AI, Veejay has turned its attention to a quietly failing layer of most organizations: middle management.
“If your KPIs don’t make sense to the people who need to deliver them, what are they good for?”
The gap between strategy and execution
At the heart of Veejay Madhavan’s criticism is a simple disconnect: Boards and executives set high-level financial goals, but those mandates are rarely translated into actionable goals for those beneath them.
“We can’t block, copy and paste a KPI that the board has given and say, ‘Okay, this is our leadership level KPI.’ The leadership level has to look at everything. That’s their job. But that does not mean that the same KPI trickles down unchanged.”
This, he says, is where most organizations falter. Metrics that may be strategically valid at the top lose their coherence further down the chain. Worse, they often become a source of confusion or slowness.
He offers a scenario: “Let’s say you give someone a KPI of generating $100 million in revenue. They have no control over that. They can’t determine how much a customer will spend, what package they will choose, or even stay. But if you say, ‘We need to find 100,000 enterprise customers who have the pain points we’re solving,’ then that makes sense. That’s something they can do.”
In other words, KPIs should reflect control and influence, not just ambition.
About why managers feel lost
The result of this misalignment? Exhausted, confused middle managers.
“Everything in a company seems urgent and important,” he says. “How can there be a hundred things that are urgent? If everything is urgent, something is wrong.”
He paints a picture of managers constantly being pulled in all directions – up to leadership, down to their teams and sideways across functions – without clarity about where their real priorities lie.
He compares the situation to an overloaded air traffic control tower. “If the people who run the fleet don’t know which plane to fly and which direction to take off, and they only get one runway, what happens? You get a backlog of planes. Everyone waits. And then you park a big plane in front of a small plane, and the small one has to wait because there’s going to be turbulence.”
He uses aviation analogies in his practice because they provide a deep way to understand systems thinking and organizational flow. The point is clear: if leaders cannot prioritize and communicate clearly, their managers cannot execute effectively.
“The judgment will come soon,” he added. “You’re asked, ‘Why haven’t you left yet?’ But no one stops to see a triple-seven flying right in front of you.
The KPI that no one owns
In Veejay’s work, ownership is one of the most common issues. KPIs become disconnected from the reality of daily work, and when they do not reflect what employees actually do or can do, they become meaningless.
“We see team members saying, ‘I’ve done my job. I’m waiting for someone else to finish theirs.’ That’s not collaboration. That is leakage,” he says. “Their KPIs were set that way. So they didn’t feel like they were part of a team; they were just completing a task.”
He calls this an ‘energy leak’: a moment when ability, insight or initiative is withheld because someone does not feel responsible for the broader goal.
“If you give someone a goal and say, ‘That’s your job,’ they’re not going to step outside of it. Even if they can help. Even if they have insight.”
For Veejay, a truly high-performing team behaves differently. The engineer doesn’t just write code. The operations person doesn’t just monitor dashboards. Everyone is aligned around a common goal and empowered to contribute across silos.
“When we say the team’s goal is to grow the customer base threefold, everyone shares that. Not from their position, but as a team. This is what true ownership looks like.”
Refurbishing the business jet
This shift from individual KPIs to team-level ownership requires structural change. And that, he says, is what most companies are resisting.
“You want to fly from Singapore to New York, but your plane is still a 737. No one is going to sit in an economy seat for 18 hours without comfort. You have to fix up the plane.”
In his analogy, the airplane is the company’s internal operating system: its structures, processes, and ways of measuring performance. With short-haul infrastructure you cannot expect long-haul performance.
“We all want to fly far and fast, but we don’t ask if our plane is ready. Is it equipped? Is the crew trained? Are the KPIs designed for that journey? Most of the time they are not.”
The implication: KPI reform is about reshaping how teams are structured, how success is defined, and how responsibility is shared.
Clarity in the middle: a systemic solution
At Oulbyz, Veejay Madhavan starts every assignment the same way: with a discovery conversation.
“We ask one thing: If you could only fix one or two things, what would they be to take your organization to the next level?”
From there, the process unfolds into alignment workshops, capacity assessments, and something he calls the “clarity workshop.” The goal is to discover where instructions fail and why managers do not translate strategy into execution.
“Sometimes it’s not a skill issue,” he explains. “HR and suppliers are doing a good job there. The problem is people don’t even know what to focus on.”
He recalls a client engagement where middle managers were juggling ten simultaneous priorities without guidance. “All they hear is urgent, urgent, urgent. But if everything is urgent, that means nothing is urgent.”
That’s when he steps in: to recalibrate not just the team, but the leadership above it.
“We help them ask the basic question: ‘What three things are most important right now?’ Because if you don’t ask, you’re flying blind.”
Sometimes the answer reveals a more uncomfortable truth.
“There are times when we run away,” he says. “We told customers, ‘Your problem isn’t with the team, it’s with you.’”
‘End clarity about outsourcing’
According to Veejay, the KPI crisis is not just about statistics. It’s about ownership of meaning.
“If your people don’t even know who they are, how can they know what to do?”
To solve this problem, companies need more than smarter spreadsheets. They need honesty, alignment, and leaders willing to prioritize clarity over control.
“We’re not a Band-Aid. We’re a mirror. We show you what you’ve patched and what’s underneath. Whether or not you act on it is up to you.”
In an age obsessed with performance, Veejay Madhavan’s message is quietly radical: clarity is the core infrastructure for everything else.
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