I used to travel to companies to work on their performance problems. Once I arrived, and we had gone through the initial pleasantries, I would ask them a simple question:
How busy is your system right now?
If the person I asked had a ballpark estimate that they quickly confirmed with a meter, I’d know that whatever problem they called me to solve would be an obscure one that would take some digging to find. If they had no idea, or only knew the answer to a resolution of an entire day, then I was pretty sure that there would be plenty of performance-related ugliness to discover. This little question became the basis for a rule of thumb that I used my entire career. 
The less a company knows about the work their system did in the last five minutes, the more deeply screwed up they are.
Your job is likely different than mine was, but there is a general truth here. If the staff can easily access data that tells them in the last few minutes how much work is flowing through the system (transactions, page views, etc.) and how the system is reacting to that work (key utilization numbers, queue depths, error counts, etc.), then they have the data to isolate and solve most common performance problems. Awareness is curative. The company will solve more of it own performance problems, see future performance problems coming sooner, and spend less money on outside performance experts.
Other rules of thumb can be found in: The Every Computer Performance Book which is available at Amazon, B&N, or Powell’s Books. The e-book is on iTunes.
The Every Computer Performance Blog 
I would qualify it as less “screwed up” and more requiring guidance on how to understand performance 😉 Fully agree with the need for those who are concerned about performance to understand their workload, performance, and resource demand profile. Thanks Bob.