Quotes About Metrics

I don't judge my performance on how many assists I have or how many points I have.

Rosser Reeves: 'Do you want fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve start moving up?

He had not been able to see it in himself, but looking at Hungerford, he was able at least to speculate on the possibility that fear, raw, physical fear, had a kind of gift to give, too. Who but the terrified has heard his own heart pounding, listened to his own stertorous breathing, wishing that heart and lungs would be more quiet, and yet learning in their pulsation the lessons of rhythm and metrics? (Anagrams, p. 80)

Quantcast combines powerful web analytics with easy-to-read charts and data.

Boxes and rectangles on the side or top of a website simply do not deliver against brand advertising goals. Like it or not, boxes and rectangles have for the most part become the province of direct response advertising, or brand advertising that pays, on average, as if it's driven by direct response metrics.

Digg will serve as a means of gathering metrics for third party websites, providing them insights into who's digging their content, who they are spreading it to.

Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies.

It's not about market share. If you have a successful company, you will get your market share. But to get a successful company, what do you have to have? The same metrics of success that your customer does.

We closely track the systems Boeing builds for us, and they're some very capable systems. So that's been my focus. It is something that I look at every month. I look at the metrics for all major combat systems and our platforms, which Boeing builds many, and they're successful platforms.

Lots of IT organizations have metrics that say, 'We're 99.99 percent on uptime, we're fast.' The plumbing is wonderful, but nobody cares.

A job is bound to be miserable if it doesn't involve measurement.

He that would run his company on visible figures alone will in time have neither company nor figures.

G.D.P. is not a measure of how much value is produced for consumers. Everybody should recognize that G.D.P. is not a welfare metric.

I'm pleased that some economists and sociologists are beginning to talk about, for example, alternative measures of human well-being - alternative, that is, to GDP, on which the world runs.

I get the normal stats, like tackles and pass completion and high-intensity runs. I get them after every game to see how similar they are to every game and to make sure I'm hitting the targets - or not too far away from them.

STABILITY METRICS How can we measure the stability of a component? One way is to count the number of dependencies that enter and leave that component. These counts will allow us to calculate the positional stability of the component.

When the I metric is 1, it means that no other component depends on this component (Ca = 0), and this component does depend on other components (Ce > 0). This is as instable as a component can get; it is irresponsible and dependent. Its lack of dependents gives it no reason not to change, and the components that it depends on may give it ample reason to change.

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.

Often, indeed, individuals are most capable of deciding on the best provider of services. But not always, and in some domains choice is particularly fraught. In healthcare, for example, choices pertaining to physicians or hospitals are made either when patients are healthy and disinclined to bother with medical matters, or when they are sick and therefore more anxious about their decisions, which diminishes their ability to process complex and often conflicting metrics.

The hazard of metrics so purely focused on monetary return on investment is that like so many metrics, they influence behavior. Already, universities at the very top of the rankings send a huge portion of their graduates into investment banking, consulting, and high-end law firms—all highly lucrative pursuits.48 These are honorable professions, but is it really in the best interests of the nation to encourage the best and the brightest to choose these careers?

Nor, according to the Dutch experts, did the publication of metrics affect patient behavior in choosing a provider or hospital. Their conclusion: "The small body of evidence available provides no consistent evidence that the public release of performance data changes consumer behavior or improves care.

The phenomenon of risk-aversion means that some patients whose lives might be saved by a risky operation are simply never operated upon. But there is also the reverse problem, that of overly aggressive care to meet metric targets. Patients whose operations are not successful may be kept alive for the requisite thirty days to improve their hospital's mortality data, a prolongation that is both costly and inhumane.

observations that are communicated through quantitative measures are regarded as "empirical," while observations conveyed in qualitative form are treated as less reliable, despite the fact that "in practice, many of the quantitative metrics used in assessments are themselves anecdotal in that they reflect the observational bias of those reporting.