Quotes About Measurement

Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.

Were I so tall as to reach the pole or grasp the ocean at a span, I must be measured by my soul. The mind is the standard of the man.

I don't measure my life by the money I've made. Other people might, but certainly don't.

Multiply all ingredients by four to get too many cupcakes.

You can't put being in love on a scale. Either you are or you aren't.

My whole life was measured in summers. Like I don't really begin living until June, until I'm at that beach, in that house.

Summer was what mattered. My whole life was measured in summers. Like I don't really begin living until June, until I'm at that beach.

Von Neumann told Shannon to call his measure entropy, since "no one knows what entropy is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.

The new Haitian baseball can't weigh more than four ounces or less than five.

Money is something that can be measured art is not. It's all subjective.

When you don't have standards, it's easier to exceed them.

In situations where there are no real feasible solutions to a problem, the gathering and publication of performance data serves as a form of virtue signaling. There is no real progress to show, but the effort demonstrated in gathering and publicizing the data satisfies a sense of moral earnestness. In lieu of real progress, the progress of measurement becomes a simulacrum of success.

There are things that can be measured. There are things that are worth measuring. But what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring; what gets measured may have no relationship to what we really want to know. The costs of measuring may be greater than the benefits. The things that get measured may draw effort away from the things we really care about. And measurement may provide us with distorted knowledge—knowledge that seems solid but is actually deceptive.

Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one's actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement, as if only that which can be counted really counts.

The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.

Metric fixation leads to a diversion of resources away from frontline producers toward managers, administrators, and those who gather and manipulate data.

If what is actually measured is a reasonable proxy for what is intended to be measured, and if it is combined with judgment, then measurement can help practitioners to assess their own performance, both for individuals and for organizations. But problems arise when such measures become the criteria used to reward and punish—when metrics become the basis of pay-for-performance or ratings.

Metric fixation is the persistence of these beliefs despite their unintended negative consequences when they are put into practice.6 It occurs because not everything that is important is measureable, and much that is measurable is unimportant.

Thus, there is a gap between the measureable contribution and the actual, total contribution of the agent. As a result, measured performance (such as an increase in the division's profits or a rise in the company's stock price) may actually lead to the organization getting less of what it really needs from its employees. Moreover, there was an inevitable distortion of incentives created by the quest for simple, quantifiable standards by which to measure and reward performance

Rankings create incentives for universities to become more like what the rankings measure. What gets measured is what gets attention. That leads to homogenization as they abandon their distinctive missions and become more like their competitors.

serious crimes such as robbery were downgraded to "theft snatch," and rapes were often underreported so as to hit performance targets. As a retired detective chief superintendent put it, "When targets are set by offices such as the Mayor's Office for Policing and Crime, what they think they are asking for are 20% fewer victims. That translates into 'record 20% fewer crimes' as far as … senior officers are concerned.

The cases of Mylan and Wells Fargo are recent examples of an older and common pattern, by which policies of payment for measured performance lead employees to engage in actions that create long-run damage to a firm's reputation.

Metric fixation, which aspires to imitate science, too often resembles faith.

For the workers under scrutiny, mental stimulation is dulled, they decide neither the problems to be solved nor how to solve them, and there is no excitement of venturing into the unknown because the unknown is beyond the measureable.