Jack Nicholson in "A Few Good Men" tells Tom Cruise "You can't handle the truth!" In business, agreeing on what the truth is would be a start...

As usual, the summer TV schedules have been full of "100 Best..." fillers. Even The Times carried a feature on "The 100 most famous people in the world". Because these kinds of league table attract attention, I wondered what books might give me the greatest pleasure for the least investment of time to read them - in other words, the "100 Best Books Ever".

I soon discovered that establishing a definitive list is impossible. For a start, how do you measure it? UK only? English language only? Would a translation be less good simply because it was not in the original language? These questions were easy to answer if I was the only judge, but the point of the exercise was to get lots and lots of other views about what made a book 'great'. Where better to go than the internet. But while I found plenty of answers, there was no agreement. Titles that I thought 'shallow' were rated by others as 'engaging'. So what's happening here?

The problem is in determining what the 'truth' is. And the fact is, it can be hard in many circumstances, including business.

Management needs good measures of current performance to compare against targets. But where does the true measure of performance come from? Many organisations assume that spending huge sums of money on enterprise data warehouses and sophisticated reporting solutions will somehow reveal the 'single version of the truth'. Indeed, the implicit belief is that you need huge investment in technology; data; and a multiplicity of reports simply because the truth is so hard to find.

A recent survey by a large communications company revealed that only 20% of international management even read the weekly KPI reports, even though it costs them a staggering £30m a year to produce the information. The main reason given was lack of relevance and arrival too long after the event.

In reality, technology can't solve the problem. The real challenge lies in reaching agreement on what really matters.

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