Quotes About Metrics

Performance metrics as a measure of accountability help to allocate blame when things go badly, but do little to encourage success,28 especially when success requires imagination, innovation, and risk. Indeed, as the economist Frank Knight noted almost a century ago, entrepreneurship entails "immeasurable uncertainty," which is not susceptible to metric calculation.

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.

Costs to productivity. Economists who specialize in measuring economic productivity report that in recent years the only increase in total factor productivity in the American economy has been in the information-technology-producing industries.11 A question that ought to be asked is to what extent the culture of metrics—with its costs in employee time, morale, and initiative, and its promotion of short-termism—has itself contributed to economic stagnation?

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.

Gaming through creaming. This takes place when practitioners find simpler targets or prefer clients with less challenging circumstances, making it easier to reach the metric goal, but excluding cases where success is more difficult to achieve.

Improving numbers by lowering standards. One way of improving metric scores is by lowering the criteria for scoring. Thus, for example, graduation rates of high schools and colleges can be increased by lowering the standards for passing. Or airlines improve their on-time performance by increasing the scheduled flying time of their flights.

Because the private sector has evolved processes and metrics for growth over many generations, for-profit models are more likely to efficiently accomplish their goals.

Too often in business, only financial data is gathered - and then it is distributed only to management. Other key indicators that relate to performance areas also need to be tracked. Information on performance has to be made available to those people who can best use it - those doing the work.

When I meet with most entrepreneurial teams, I ask them a simple question: How do you know that you're making progress? Most of them really can't answer that question.

It's kind of debatable whether or not the advertisement model is effective. Like whether Nielsen works. For years, Nielsen has been based on sampling. It's not like an electronic bullet that hits your house that tells the people at networks at all times what you're watching.

We know the parental support, community support, makes a difference. It's not just the metrics of testing and putting pressure on the schools and on the teachers.

A nongrowing company can be tremendously prosperous and deliver the vast majority of that prosperity to its shareholders. It just might not come in the form of a rising share price, which is the only metric most shareholders understand. That's why shareholders need to be trained to value other metrics or be replaced by people who do.

Is a programmer who gets 99% of assignments done on time and 95% error free better than one who gets only 92% done on time but with a 99% error-free rate? Is total product quality higher if the defect rate is 15% lower but customer returns are 10% higher? Is "strategic alignment" higher if the profit went up by 10% but the "total quality index" went down by 5%?

Anything you need to quantify can be measured in some way that is superior to not measuring it at all. —Gilb's Law

It sounds as if we're assessing the quality of a work of art in terms of its attributes, but in fact we're doing the opposite—deciding first which painting is the best, and only then inferring from its attributes the metrics of quality.

Technology has changed, and we need to figure out how to improve the archaic way of what makes a hit, or how to determine how many viewers are watching beyond some people with Nielsen boxes in a small percentage of homes in random areas.

The most important metrics are did we execute the way in which we said we would, and did we deliver the value to the business that we had promised?

When a positive exchange between a brand and customers becomes quantifiable metrics, it encourages brand to provide better service, customer service to do a better job, and consumers to actively show their gratitude.

The list of companies that have added their own financial metrics is not a savory group.

Metrics are not a device for restraining the mad, any more than 'open form' or free verse is a prairie where a man can do all kinds of manly things in a state of wholesome unrestrictedness.

We measure everything - why not governance?

In baseball you have terrific data and you can be a lot more creative with it.

We know the parental support, community support, makes a difference. It's not just the metrics of testing and putting pressure on the schools and on the teachers.

Baseball fans are junkies, and their heroin is the statistic.