“Shaping the company's future requires understanding the key drivers of value for the company and establishing metrics to measure progress.”
Source: Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance
“This thrilled Zuckerberg, whose primary measure of the service’s success was how often users returned.”
Source: The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World
“The only measurement I understand is perfection.”
“Performance metrics are numbers in context, results related to the strategic goals of the business.”
Source: The Change Agent CIO
“In real life, the value capture process is sometimes deliberately managed by elites to manipulate and control others with game design-like tactics. Gig economy platforms like Uber and Lyft use "badges" and rating systems to manage the decision-making environment of their driver employees. Even outside of work, social media features such as likes, shares, and retweets play the role of points in games. Over time, these simple metrics threaten to distort or take the place of values (say, the wish to meaningfully contribute to discussion or to take pride in the quality of one's work) that might otherwise have inflected our behavior on these platforms.”
Source: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics
“Herman Bluebeard, who said to Scotland Yard, 'How do I know how many women I've killed? I'm a murderer, not an accountant!”
Source: I Never Got a Dinner: The Autobiography of Red Buttons
“When we look at the life of Jesus, we see that He didn’t draw large crowds for the sake of counting heads or logging attendance. He never gauged effectiveness by nickels and noses. Therefore, the goal of the church should not be to build a megachurch. The end goal is to build a healthy church with mature believers.”
Source: Ordinary Radicals: A Return to Christ-Centered Discipleship
“In the end, there is no silver bullet, no substitute for actually knowing one's subject and one's organization, which is partly a matter of experience and partly a matter of unquantifiable skill. Many matters of importance are too subject to judgement and interpretation to be solved by standardized metrics. Ultimately, the issue is not one of metrics versus judgment, but metrics as informing judgement, which includes knowing how much weight to give to metrics, recognizing their characteristic distortions, and appreciating what can't be measured. In recent decades, too many politicians, business leaders, policymakers, and academic officials have lost sight of that.”
Source: The Tyranny of Metrics
“The tranquility of the moment reminded me that life was full of uncertainties, but also of endless possibilities.
As much as I hated to admit my own defeat in my war of feelings and naivety, I really liked her.”
Source: Unrequited Echoes
“To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it, is to be blind and to mislead others," as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgement. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgement applies more broadly: judgement is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, "a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together." A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.”
Source: The Tyranny of Metrics