MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Don't Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business

“Don’t Let Metrics Undermine Your Business,” warns Harvard Business Review’s September-October 2019 cover story: “Strategy is abstract by definition, but metrics give strategy form, allowing our minds to grasp it more readily. & The mental tendency to replace strategy with metrics can destroy company value.”

The irresistible rise of data-driven, analytics-enriched digital instrumentation and decisions has provoked an intellectual backlash. Call it a counterrevolution. Those lucky employees who haven’t been automated into professional obsolescence instead find themselves enduring what economic historian Jerry Z. Muller calls the “tyranny of metrics.” Numbers rule their workplace lives, and there’s no escape.

“The problem is not measurement,” Muller declares, “but excessive measurement and inappropriate measurement — not metrics, but metric fixation.”