Measure You Get What You Measure the

Measure You Get What You Measure The phrase "you get what you pay for" is pretty easy to understand, but "you get what you measure" is a little more difficult -- measuring doesn't actually procure or "get" anything other than a measurement, and of course you get the measurement that you take -- that's self-evident, right? In the business world, though, people often seem to think that they can get whatever results they want simply by suiting the measurement to suit their own purposes, even if this doesn't really measure what they imagine it to.

Measurements of the security of an investment, for example, are useless if they don't actually measure the likelihood of the investment failing or growing. Measures of market size are irrelevant if the market measured isn't specific to the product or service being marketed, price comparisons are invalid if substantial product differences exist, etc. The willingness to delude oneself about the potential for fantastic gains often steers investors, finance managers, and others involved in the business world to use measures that do not really "get" them what they are seeking.

Understood in this light, "you get what you measure" is actually somewhat similar to "you get what you pay for" -- both statements mean that the output will only be as valuable as the output. Careful and accurate measures that are truly objective and honest are the only measures that really matter; all else is delusion or potentially worse.

Because of the tendency to inflate the chances of success and to support this inflation with supposed "evidence" gathered from a battery of inappropriate or haphazard measurements, all individuals engaged in business pursuits should take care to use measures that get them what they need. Years ago, when employed as a pizza maker in a chain restaurant, I came across a number of performance measures that always seemed to be off target in a number of ways.

One of these was the time between an order coming in and when the pizza came out of the oven -- a time that was supposed to be kept under a certain amount in all circumstances. This measure was supposed to reflect both the quality of service provided to the customers and the work efficiency in the kitchen, yet this measure failed on both counts.

During extremely busy periods it was truly impossible to keep the allotted time interval between receiving an order and getting the pizza out of the oven, sometimes because the number of workers in the kitchen simply couldn't move fast enough to keep up with the orders, and sometimes because the oven did not physically have space for all of the pizzas that needed to cook. Customers were actually very understanding and very.