We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the
belief of so many organizations that scientific management means replacing
judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized measures of
performance, and then rewarding or punishing individuals and organizations
based upon those measures. The buzzwords of metric fixation are all around us:
“metrics,” “accountability,” “assessment,” and “transparency.”
The Tyranny of Metrics treats metric fixation as the
organizational equivalent of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Though often
characterized as “best practice,” metric fixation is in fact often
counterproductive, with costs to individual satisfaction with work,
organizational effectiveness, and economic growth. The book helps explain why
metric fixation has become so popular, why it is so often counterproductive,
and why some people have an interest in promoting it. It is a book that
analyzes and critiques a dominant fashion in contemporary organizational
culture, with an eye to making life in organizations more satisfying and
productive. It’s a book about management broadly construed. But unlike most
authors who write about management, it also tries to see organizations from the
perspective of the managed.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the belief of so many organizations that scientific management means replacing judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized measures of performance, and then rewarding or punishing individuals and organizations based upon those measures. The buzzwords of metric fixation are all around us: “metrics,” “accountability,” “assessment,” and “transparency.”
The Tyranny of Metrics treats metric fixation as the organizational equivalent of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Though often characterized as “best practice,” metric fixation is in fact often counterproductive, with costs to individual satisfaction with work, organizational effectiveness, and economic growth. The book helps explain why metric fixation has become so popular, why it is so often counterproductive, and why some people have an interest in promoting it. It is a book that analyzes and critiques a dominant fashion in contemporary organizational culture, with an eye to making life in organizations more satisfying and productive. It’s a book about management broadly construed. But unlike most authors who write about management, it also tries to see organizations from the perspective of the managed.