Anyone who has worked at a large organization, especially if they have been in charge of a department or section, will have encountered the dreaded metrics. Someone in upper management decides that they need to measure precisely how effective each part of the organization is functioning and so they develop some sort of metric that is sent out which section heads are supposed to periodically fill in and return.
The problem is that unless you are dealing with highly tangible and easily measurable entities, like the number of widgets that are produced per day, metrics can turn out to be extremely frustrating to fill out and even counter-productive, as Jerry Z. Muller explains.
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