Another day, another management article with a lot of opinions and no research. I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/w

Another day, another management article with a lot of opinions and no research. I find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrogation to be better starting points on the dangers of organizational measurement. > The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. > Managers tend to use measures as surrogates for strategy, acting as if measures were in fact the strategy when making optimization decisions. This appears to occur even if a measure-maximizing choice ultimately works against the strategy. For those interested in history, there's a lot to learn about metric abuse from the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. For example: > On October 27, 1967, The Wall Street Journal ran an un-bylined blurb from its Washington, D.C., bureau on the front page talking about a “victory index.”: U.S. strategists seek a “victory index” to measure progress in the Vietnam War. They want a single statistic reflecting enemy infiltration, casualties, recruiting, hamlets pacified, roads cleared. Top U.S. intelligence officials, in a recent secret huddle, couldn’t work out an index; they get orders to keep trying. (from: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/the-computer-that-predicted-the-us-would-win-the-vietnam-war/542046/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/10/the-c...)