Quotes About Measurement

Diminishing utility. Sometimes, newly introduced performance metrics will have immediate benefits in discovering poorly performing outliers.5 Having gleaned the low-hanging fruit, there is tendency to expect a continuingly bountiful harvest. The problem is that the metrics continue to get collected from everyone. And soon the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits.

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 in many cases, the extension of standardized measurement may be of diminishing utility, or even counterproductive—sliding from sensible solutions to metric madness.

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.

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted."7) Most organizations have multiple purposes, and that which is measured and rewarded tends to become the focus of attention, at the expense of other essential goals. Similarly, many jobs have multiple facets, and measuring only a few aspects creates incentives to neglect the rest.

Any measure used for control is unreliable."10 To put it another way, anything that can be measured and rewarded will be gamed.

metric fixation has elements of a cult. Studies that demonstrate its lack of effectiveness are either ignored, or met with the assertion that what is needed is more data and better measurement.

Measuring the most easily measurable. There is a natural human tendency to try to simplify problems by focusing on the most easily measureable elements.1 But what is most easily measured is rarely what is most important, indeed sometimes not important at all. That is the first source of metric dysfunction.

measuring the simple when the desired outcome is complex. Most jobs have multiple responsibilities and most organizations have multiple goals. Focusing measurement on just one responsibility or goal often leads to deceptive results.

So organizations measure what they've spent, rather than what they produce, or they measure process rather than product.

We have to judge politicians by their cumulative score. In one innings they make a great catch, in another they drop the ball. In one they score a home run, in another they strike out. But it is their cumulative batting average that we are interested in.

By his own careful measure, he consumed up to two hundred grams of sugar a day, equivalent to forty-eight teaspoons.

He was eighteen feet from nose to tail, the fisherman who was measuring him called.

The Sumerians also developed a counting system based on the number sixty, which is divisible by eleven other numbers and so particularly handy for Bronze Age accountancy. From this we get our 60-second minutes, 60-minute hours, 360-day years and 360-degree circles.

Age is a funny thing. People tend to think it can be measured only by time, but events crowd days into weeks, weeks into months, and months into new years.

The first rule is that a measurement—any measurement—is better than none. But a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved. Obviously, you measure a salesman by the orders he gets (output), not by the calls he makes (activity).

a genuinely effective indicator will cover the output of the work unit and not simply the activity involved.

A simple test can be used to determine where someone is in the motivational hierarchy. If the absolute sum of a raise in salary an individual receives is important to him, he is working mostly within the physiological or safety modes. If, however, what matters to him is how his raise stacks up against what other people got, he is motivated by esteem/recognition or self-actualization, because in this case money is clearly a measure.

management by objectives—MBO

For the feedback to be effective, it must be received very soon after the activity it is measuring occurs. Accordingly, an MBO system should set objectives for a relatively short period. For example, if we plan on a yearly basis, the corresponding MBO system's time frame should be at least as often as quarterly or perhaps even monthly.

An imaginary composite index can be applied to measure an environment's complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity, which we'll call the CUA factor.

in the work of the soft professions, it becomes very difficult to distinguish between output and activity. And as noted, stressing output is the key to improving productivity, while looking to increase activity can result in just the opposite.

instead of time defining the behaviour of a clock, the light clock essentially defines time!

To weigh something one needs a platform on which to stand to do the weighing.