BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU MEASURE
“the easiest thing to measure will dominate all decisions. be careful.”
The Lesson
If one thing is easy to measure and another is intangible, the measurable thing will dominate decisions. During the pandemic, leaders knew they'd be measured on death rates per thousand. So they managed to that-lockdowns, restrictions. But the intangible costs (psychological wellbeing, lost income, quality of life) had no clean numbers, so they got ignored. This put leaders in opposition to citizens, whose interests were more balanced. The lesson: the easiest thing to measure biases everything. Be aware when a single metric is distorting judgment.
Real-World Example
A founder tracks revenue obsessively-it's easy to measure. Customer satisfaction is harder to track, so it gets less attention. Revenue grows, but churn quietly increases. Eventually the company hits a wall: acquisition costs rise, the easy revenue gains are gone, and they've neglected the retention that would have compounded. The measurable metric dominated; the important but fuzzy metric was ignored.
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