What a tragedy. Indeed, like watching a great ocean liner sink. The leaders are doing all the "logical" things, the same kind of "logical" things that got them there. Indeed, the same "logic" they learned in business school, taught not by the leaders of real businesses, but by those who for some reason don't fit into a real business (perhaps that reason makes them better teachers, somehow).
I've talked before about my experience at HP, when all the smartest people wanted to be there and the environment was so stimulating that most people who left, came back. Now look at it, being dynamited into rubble by leaders who keep saying, "When I blow this next thing up the company will really start to hum!"
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
The Anti-Creative Bias
A guest posting by Fabio Cecin.
People are biased against creative ideas, studies find.
To promote creativity and innovation in a company, the first thing to do is to leave people alone when they say they want to create something (whatever that is). Second, wrap/route the maintenance of business as usual around creativity (the creator will help you with this, because he loves your business, because the business shields him from the bad bad world of having to package and market his own stuff as discrete products, and because the business doesn't treat him as a mere execution/maintenance resource).
A business must staff itself in a way to be prepared when creativity and exploration wants to happen, if not for the financial health of the business, then for the health of the people it is supposed to serve (the workers, which are also the consumers of stuff produced by other workers).
Creative people holding the spark seem to very quickly and cheaply produce prototypes (either that or they fail and give up, having learned things that months of dead "training" wouldn't be able to teach them). Prototypes show in seconds what months of powerpointing and draining, speculative, left-brained/over-rational argumentation carried in ego-measuring, soul-crushing, tiresome and predictable meetings won't do in a year.
This is not about trust. Trust cannot be trusted, because if we trusted ourselves in the first place, we wouldn't be subjecting ourselves to the corporate grind. And if we don't trust ourselves, how are we supposed to trust others? Freedom to create is not something that requires trust: it is the basic mechanism that humans use to build trust in themselves. Your work is the body of scientific evidence that you use to establish trust in yourself. As a scientific proof, it is never complete and can always be falsified, so you keep adding to it. The main function of work for a human is to help him grow, so it seems pointless to me that you are asked to grow first, to have a "reputation," to "work smarter," to develop persuasion skills, and to have to "fight" for your right to create versus being told to grind somewhere "until you can show worth." This is backwards. And if you do try to sell your ideas, you are lying anyway, because you don't really know whether what you are creating is worth pursuing or not: you will be just a shallow salesman, fighting anxiously to fulfill the promise after you've sold it. To me, if you don't know enough about the thing you want to create, it is dishonest to argue for it.
Instead, concrete creation and exploration itself is the way you say the important things to others and to yourself. It is the non-neurotic way forward. Creation is just basic conversation and it should be as pervasive and light an affair as talking. The right to create and to work in what you believe, what your intuition points to, is the right to speak, the right to assert that your existence is valid. It does not matter whether a creative effort is misguided or not, the creator must be allowed to pursue it, or else a growth opportunity is curtailed, and this is bad for absolutely everyone.
Having established this as the starting point, wrapping the business/financials around this is another matter entirely.
-- Fabio
People are biased against creative ideas, studies find.
"The studies' findings include:My conclusion: creativity only happens through creation. Do first, ask questions later.
- Creative ideas are by definition novel, and novelty can trigger feelings of uncertainty that make most people uncomfortable.
- People dismiss creative ideas in favor of ideas that are purely practical -- tried and true.
- Objective evidence shoring up the validity of a creative proposal does not motivate people to accept it.
- Anti-creativity bias is so subtle that people are unaware of it, which can interfere with their ability to recognize a creative idea."
To promote creativity and innovation in a company, the first thing to do is to leave people alone when they say they want to create something (whatever that is). Second, wrap/route the maintenance of business as usual around creativity (the creator will help you with this, because he loves your business, because the business shields him from the bad bad world of having to package and market his own stuff as discrete products, and because the business doesn't treat him as a mere execution/maintenance resource).
A business must staff itself in a way to be prepared when creativity and exploration wants to happen, if not for the financial health of the business, then for the health of the people it is supposed to serve (the workers, which are also the consumers of stuff produced by other workers).
Creative people holding the spark seem to very quickly and cheaply produce prototypes (either that or they fail and give up, having learned things that months of dead "training" wouldn't be able to teach them). Prototypes show in seconds what months of powerpointing and draining, speculative, left-brained/over-rational argumentation carried in ego-measuring, soul-crushing, tiresome and predictable meetings won't do in a year.
This is not about trust. Trust cannot be trusted, because if we trusted ourselves in the first place, we wouldn't be subjecting ourselves to the corporate grind. And if we don't trust ourselves, how are we supposed to trust others? Freedom to create is not something that requires trust: it is the basic mechanism that humans use to build trust in themselves. Your work is the body of scientific evidence that you use to establish trust in yourself. As a scientific proof, it is never complete and can always be falsified, so you keep adding to it. The main function of work for a human is to help him grow, so it seems pointless to me that you are asked to grow first, to have a "reputation," to "work smarter," to develop persuasion skills, and to have to "fight" for your right to create versus being told to grind somewhere "until you can show worth." This is backwards. And if you do try to sell your ideas, you are lying anyway, because you don't really know whether what you are creating is worth pursuing or not: you will be just a shallow salesman, fighting anxiously to fulfill the promise after you've sold it. To me, if you don't know enough about the thing you want to create, it is dishonest to argue for it.
Instead, concrete creation and exploration itself is the way you say the important things to others and to yourself. It is the non-neurotic way forward. Creation is just basic conversation and it should be as pervasive and light an affair as talking. The right to create and to work in what you believe, what your intuition points to, is the right to speak, the right to assert that your existence is valid. It does not matter whether a creative effort is misguided or not, the creator must be allowed to pursue it, or else a growth opportunity is curtailed, and this is bad for absolutely everyone.
Having established this as the starting point, wrapping the business/financials around this is another matter entirely.
-- Fabio
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Welcome to Mars
An odd bit of synchronicity: I'm reading Life, Inc. which talks about the creation of Levittown and suburbs in general as a way for corporatism to harness the American by making him too busy mowing lawns and taking care of the house to become a communist. The book goes so far as to say that the heavily-touted idea of home ownership was mostly a scam to convert low-value rural land into expensive, desirable suburban property -- by inventing the concept and desirability of suburbanism in the first place.
On a long drive, I began listening to Welcome to Mars, a 12-part podcast series of lectures on the "fantasies of science" from 1947-1959. I expected to listen to one, perhaps two of these while driving but quickly discovered that it's completely addicting and just kept listening to one after another. Just like Life, Inc., it's full of fascinating things that you either never heard of in history class, or that contradicts what you learned there (the stories of the CIA and their rather extensive experiments with hallucinogenics on unsuspecting members of the public are especially eye-widening).
Welcome to Mars also begins with Levittown, but adds that a major motivation is the reaction to the devastation in Europe during WWII by "death from above." Apparently the thinking was that, by spreading the population out via suburbs, they would be less vulnerable to the kind of bombing that caused so much damage in Europe. (Mixed into all the episodes are descriptions of science-fiction movies that were coming out, and how they related to the events and ideas of the time).
The theme running through both stories is control, specifically mind control. The CIA was looking for a way to control minds through drugs, while corporatism looks for a way to produce docile robot-workers for its factories. Somehow Levittown seems to be an icon not just for the goal of control, but how it fails.
One of the more memorable electives I took as an undergraduate was Environmental Psychology. I learned much in the course but the one thing I've seen again and again is that humans find sameness quite disturbing. As an experiment in putting people into identical boxes, Levittown was an astounding failure. Indeed, it began with all houses perfectly identical, but the changes made by the owners (encouraged by the design of the house) has made that virtually unrecognizable. Although it was intended to create social conformity (and regulations including those from the FHA prevented non-caucasians from living there), it seemed to do the opposite; it might even have been one of the starting points for the explorations that started the unrest of the 60s.
Whether you look at attempts to put people into identical boxes as simply a government goal, or as the goal of a government manipulated by corporate interests, the goal itself is flawed. It seems to be our fundamental nature to express our individuality -- perhaps this comes from biology, which is primarily interested in variations. Even if we were convinced for some decades of our history that we needed to become robots to work in factories, the real robots have taken over and meat robots have become too expensive and difficult to use this way. The only thing we're good for now is what we seem to be designed for in the first place (and what those in power have been trying to suppress for so long): our creative uniqueness, which (as Seth Godin, Dan Pink and many others have been saying for awhile now) we need to discover and develop. There is no place for us as robots anymore.
On a long drive, I began listening to Welcome to Mars, a 12-part podcast series of lectures on the "fantasies of science" from 1947-1959. I expected to listen to one, perhaps two of these while driving but quickly discovered that it's completely addicting and just kept listening to one after another. Just like Life, Inc., it's full of fascinating things that you either never heard of in history class, or that contradicts what you learned there (the stories of the CIA and their rather extensive experiments with hallucinogenics on unsuspecting members of the public are especially eye-widening).
Welcome to Mars also begins with Levittown, but adds that a major motivation is the reaction to the devastation in Europe during WWII by "death from above." Apparently the thinking was that, by spreading the population out via suburbs, they would be less vulnerable to the kind of bombing that caused so much damage in Europe. (Mixed into all the episodes are descriptions of science-fiction movies that were coming out, and how they related to the events and ideas of the time).
The theme running through both stories is control, specifically mind control. The CIA was looking for a way to control minds through drugs, while corporatism looks for a way to produce docile robot-workers for its factories. Somehow Levittown seems to be an icon not just for the goal of control, but how it fails.
One of the more memorable electives I took as an undergraduate was Environmental Psychology. I learned much in the course but the one thing I've seen again and again is that humans find sameness quite disturbing. As an experiment in putting people into identical boxes, Levittown was an astounding failure. Indeed, it began with all houses perfectly identical, but the changes made by the owners (encouraged by the design of the house) has made that virtually unrecognizable. Although it was intended to create social conformity (and regulations including those from the FHA prevented non-caucasians from living there), it seemed to do the opposite; it might even have been one of the starting points for the explorations that started the unrest of the 60s.
Whether you look at attempts to put people into identical boxes as simply a government goal, or as the goal of a government manipulated by corporate interests, the goal itself is flawed. It seems to be our fundamental nature to express our individuality -- perhaps this comes from biology, which is primarily interested in variations. Even if we were convinced for some decades of our history that we needed to become robots to work in factories, the real robots have taken over and meat robots have become too expensive and difficult to use this way. The only thing we're good for now is what we seem to be designed for in the first place (and what those in power have been trying to suppress for so long): our creative uniqueness, which (as Seth Godin, Dan Pink and many others have been saying for awhile now) we need to discover and develop. There is no place for us as robots anymore.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
Transactions are Magic
I'm reading this book:
It's a real brain-twister, on the order of The Management Myth. It's full of profound, disturbing descriptions of the history you sort of learned in school, but filtered through the lens of corporatism and its desires (which makes that history completely different). The world he describes, even though it is the world we grew up in, is not a happy one, and the directions that raw corporatism takes us are not happy.
Reading this story I find myself wondering what the motivation is at its core, especially because the whole system co-opts us into joining it, through a mix of fulfilled and unfulfilled promises.
When you sell something, it "instantly" converts that thing, whether it's something you made or bought or a service you provide, into money. And money, we are told, allows you to get anything you want and that, apparently, leads to happiness. So a transaction is magic: it takes something we have and turns it into our heart's desire.
It doesn't matter how many of the premises behind this myth are untrue. We buy the story: If we do this, we will become happy. And yes, it hasn't worked all those times before, but maybe it will work the next time. After all, they wouldn't tell us the story if it weren't true, so we're probably doing something wrong and this time it will work for sure.
Perhaps it's also the reason that (in this country, anyway) there are so many people who get quite angry if you try to show them anything that disagrees with the myths we've been taught. We have more than one institution that teaches us to deny the evidence of our senses.
It's a real brain-twister, on the order of The Management Myth. It's full of profound, disturbing descriptions of the history you sort of learned in school, but filtered through the lens of corporatism and its desires (which makes that history completely different). The world he describes, even though it is the world we grew up in, is not a happy one, and the directions that raw corporatism takes us are not happy.
Reading this story I find myself wondering what the motivation is at its core, especially because the whole system co-opts us into joining it, through a mix of fulfilled and unfulfilled promises.
When you sell something, it "instantly" converts that thing, whether it's something you made or bought or a service you provide, into money. And money, we are told, allows you to get anything you want and that, apparently, leads to happiness. So a transaction is magic: it takes something we have and turns it into our heart's desire.
It doesn't matter how many of the premises behind this myth are untrue. We buy the story: If we do this, we will become happy. And yes, it hasn't worked all those times before, but maybe it will work the next time. After all, they wouldn't tell us the story if it weren't true, so we're probably doing something wrong and this time it will work for sure.
Perhaps it's also the reason that (in this country, anyway) there are so many people who get quite angry if you try to show them anything that disagrees with the myths we've been taught. We have more than one institution that teaches us to deny the evidence of our senses.
Friday, August 5, 2011
Transformative
Last night we opened "Midsummer Night's Dream," one of Shakespeare's most beloved and accessible plays. It was directed by a favorite director who used to live here and now comes up periodically to visit and direct. She's been away for several years and perhaps for that reason (bottled-up creativity) she wanted to try something different. She introduced us to a technique from Manhattan called Viewpoints; although we only skimmed the surface the experience was transformative. Not just in what it did to our acting, but the way our director used the process made every rehearsal a great experience. This is very different from the previous plays I've been in, where rehearsals are typically work and struggle and sometimes unpleasant. Each one of these rehearsals was a transformative experience in itself, because the goal was not to tell us what to do, but rather to draw out our own expression of the play. Performing the play is wonderful, but I also found myself thinking that if we had only done the rehearsals, that would have been a great experience all by itself.
It is also very satisfying to work with actors you know will treat the play professionally. It changes the experience when you have the safety net of the the other team members so you can focus on what really matters.
What I find most interesting about these exceptional experiences is the doorway you pass through whenever you have them. I definitely want to have the amazing experiences, but I'm very aware that it ruins me for the mediocre experiences I formerly thought were OK.
For years, I thought it was pretty cool that occasionally some company would contact me and have me come out for some training or consulting. But then I did a series of consulting visits with a company in Albuquerque and the experience was so great (once again, because of the "director," the VP who ran the group I worked with) that consulting experiences that are less than this are no longer satisfying.
The transformative experience creates a gap, because the old experiences aren't good enough anymore, but you don't know how to repeatedly find the new experiences. It's hard enough to find consulting jobs that fit, much less the amazing ones.
In my teens I came to the conclusion that all company life was terrible, so I wanted to get away from being an employee as soon as I could. Only recently have I revisited that belief and discovered that there are actually a few rare companies that focus on creating a positive employee experience -- much like our director focused on developing us as actors -- and now I wonder what I might have missed. Visiting Zappos, I see one example of an alternative way to work and I'm even less able to settle for the pedestrian.
I worked in the conventional conference world for many years before I was transformed by Open Spaces. Now, the only think that keeps me engaged in the old "eyes-forward" style of conference is if I'm speaking at one (which I still do, but I try to create conversations at such conferences whenever I can). And from that I have also realized how ineffective traditional educational approaches are towards the goal of creating creative, self-motivated non-robots.
There's a meta-issue: once you begin to realize that these exceptional transformational experiences are out there, you begin seeking them for themselves. Late in my college career I discovered that there were a very few exceptional teachers, and if you found one out, it was worth taking whatever they taught. You'd get more out of an "off-track" subject with one of these teachers than multiple ordinary teachers in your major field.
For the past 15 years or so I've been a regular visitor to Esalen, which tries to get the very best workshop leaders (mostly attracting them because of the environment and promise of a working vacation). These are usually the people who have invented the technique they are teaching. And most of those workshops have been transformative in any number of ways, which keeps me coming back. The first time you go, they offer a session in returning to the real world, because if you've never done it, it can be a big shock to see the "heightened reality" of what the world could be like and then be forced to return to your normal life. The same is true of Burning Man, although I only know of warnings and no workshops on the subject.
Esalen and Burning Man vs. the vacancy of experience in ordinary conferences have been a strong influence on my own events and seeking ways to make them transformative. Although last week's Programming Summer Camp seemed quiet probably because it was effortless, no one appeared able to think of ways to make it better. When everyone can choose their own experience, it makes it much easier to have the best time possible.
When you have a transformative experience, the aftermath is a kind of vacuum, as you re-adjust to your old life (except that you never quite fit back in). Whether you know it or not, the question underlying the vacuum is this: "How can I live in this heightened state all the time?"
It is also very satisfying to work with actors you know will treat the play professionally. It changes the experience when you have the safety net of the the other team members so you can focus on what really matters.
What I find most interesting about these exceptional experiences is the doorway you pass through whenever you have them. I definitely want to have the amazing experiences, but I'm very aware that it ruins me for the mediocre experiences I formerly thought were OK.
For years, I thought it was pretty cool that occasionally some company would contact me and have me come out for some training or consulting. But then I did a series of consulting visits with a company in Albuquerque and the experience was so great (once again, because of the "director," the VP who ran the group I worked with) that consulting experiences that are less than this are no longer satisfying.
The transformative experience creates a gap, because the old experiences aren't good enough anymore, but you don't know how to repeatedly find the new experiences. It's hard enough to find consulting jobs that fit, much less the amazing ones.
In my teens I came to the conclusion that all company life was terrible, so I wanted to get away from being an employee as soon as I could. Only recently have I revisited that belief and discovered that there are actually a few rare companies that focus on creating a positive employee experience -- much like our director focused on developing us as actors -- and now I wonder what I might have missed. Visiting Zappos, I see one example of an alternative way to work and I'm even less able to settle for the pedestrian.
I worked in the conventional conference world for many years before I was transformed by Open Spaces. Now, the only think that keeps me engaged in the old "eyes-forward" style of conference is if I'm speaking at one (which I still do, but I try to create conversations at such conferences whenever I can). And from that I have also realized how ineffective traditional educational approaches are towards the goal of creating creative, self-motivated non-robots.
There's a meta-issue: once you begin to realize that these exceptional transformational experiences are out there, you begin seeking them for themselves. Late in my college career I discovered that there were a very few exceptional teachers, and if you found one out, it was worth taking whatever they taught. You'd get more out of an "off-track" subject with one of these teachers than multiple ordinary teachers in your major field.
For the past 15 years or so I've been a regular visitor to Esalen, which tries to get the very best workshop leaders (mostly attracting them because of the environment and promise of a working vacation). These are usually the people who have invented the technique they are teaching. And most of those workshops have been transformative in any number of ways, which keeps me coming back. The first time you go, they offer a session in returning to the real world, because if you've never done it, it can be a big shock to see the "heightened reality" of what the world could be like and then be forced to return to your normal life. The same is true of Burning Man, although I only know of warnings and no workshops on the subject.
Esalen and Burning Man vs. the vacancy of experience in ordinary conferences have been a strong influence on my own events and seeking ways to make them transformative. Although last week's Programming Summer Camp seemed quiet probably because it was effortless, no one appeared able to think of ways to make it better. When everyone can choose their own experience, it makes it much easier to have the best time possible.
When you have a transformative experience, the aftermath is a kind of vacuum, as you re-adjust to your old life (except that you never quite fit back in). Whether you know it or not, the question underlying the vacuum is this: "How can I live in this heightened state all the time?"
Tuesday, August 2, 2011
You Get What You Measure
The biggest problem I see within the business community is the inability to understand the phrase, correlation is not causation. That is, just because one thing appears to correspond to another thing doesn't mean that one causes the other. This probably goes back to Frederick Winslow Taylor declaring management to be a science after manipulating all his data to produce his desired conclusions -- and then all the brand-new management schools blindly following in his footsteps (the big dirty secret they can't shake off). One after the other, management "gurus" followed in Taylor's footsteps by producing the conclusions they wanted by whatever means possible (after all, that was Taylor's brand of "science").
This kind of thinking spills out of business schools into the business world. Even entrepreneurs who quit school before it has a chance to do too much damage fall victim; this kind of magical thinking seems to permeate our society.
I listened to a presentation from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Though Leader Podcast by Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga (article is worth reading), who has clearly had a lot of success and is certain that this success correlates with what he did to get there. He is not alone; many of the speakers in this series tell us "the answers." Except that the answers often don't agree, and this suggests a high degree of superstition. Very few people start enough businesses to turn the process into a rolling experiment, so it's natural: you typically have a very limited set of data points, so you do your best to extrapolate from that. The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine, and so good at that it can find patterns that aren't actually there.
Pincus remarked that if you don't measure results, it's worthless to do experiments. On its face this is undeniable. If you don't pay attention to the outcome, it's not an experiment. You certainly can't establish causation if you aren't measuring to see if the outcome even changes when you change the input -- but in a hard-science experiment, you must isolate the input first so that you can be sure it's not something else that's causing the output to wiggle. This kind of isolation is typically impossible in a real-world situation, as social scientists know well; they are reduced to using various tricks to try to establish causation under such messy circumstances. Neither this level of complexity or the associated tricks are taught in business school; instead they teach "modeling" wherein you pretend that your model is the real thing.
The deeper impact of Pincus' remark comes from the "measurement" part, and harks back to the belief that "You can't manage what you can't measure" (a misquote attributed to Deming, who on the contrary declared that one of the seven deadly diseases of management is running a company on visible figures alone).
It's certainly true that if you have a goal and you make changes without trying to somehow evaluate the effect of those changes, then your progress towards that goal will be a random walk.
But when you choose what to measure, you also choose the conclusions of your experiments. In U.S. schools we measure test scores, so students learn how to take tests rather than how to think and be creative (what we actually need). MBA schools teach their students to measure quarterly profits, so other company values go by the wayside when they get infected by such MBAs.
The parable of the "furniture police" from Peopleware is an extreme example of this. Someone in management (probably an MBA) creates a spreadsheet that shows how much money the company can save by shrinking cubicle size. The MBA has only been trained to measure the quarterly effects of changes, and so is unable to see any other effects -- effects that can be far more damaging to the company's bottom line than the short term savings from rearranging the furniture. I think Einstein's greatest quote is "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
When you decide what to measure, you set your goal; you predetermine what is going to be important. True science must repeatedly cast a broad net and let the data show the way. Management is not a science, so we cannot draw scientific conclusions (we must discard Taylorism and all its descendants). And yet we must somehow muddle forward and figure out how to do things better and better.
In my mind, the only measure of any worth is, "Does this make you happy?" Indeed, what is the point of any other?
This kind of thinking spills out of business schools into the business world. Even entrepreneurs who quit school before it has a chance to do too much damage fall victim; this kind of magical thinking seems to permeate our society.
I listened to a presentation from the Stanford Entrepreneurial Though Leader Podcast by Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga (article is worth reading), who has clearly had a lot of success and is certain that this success correlates with what he did to get there. He is not alone; many of the speakers in this series tell us "the answers." Except that the answers often don't agree, and this suggests a high degree of superstition. Very few people start enough businesses to turn the process into a rolling experiment, so it's natural: you typically have a very limited set of data points, so you do your best to extrapolate from that. The human brain is a pattern-seeking machine, and so good at that it can find patterns that aren't actually there.
Pincus remarked that if you don't measure results, it's worthless to do experiments. On its face this is undeniable. If you don't pay attention to the outcome, it's not an experiment. You certainly can't establish causation if you aren't measuring to see if the outcome even changes when you change the input -- but in a hard-science experiment, you must isolate the input first so that you can be sure it's not something else that's causing the output to wiggle. This kind of isolation is typically impossible in a real-world situation, as social scientists know well; they are reduced to using various tricks to try to establish causation under such messy circumstances. Neither this level of complexity or the associated tricks are taught in business school; instead they teach "modeling" wherein you pretend that your model is the real thing.
The deeper impact of Pincus' remark comes from the "measurement" part, and harks back to the belief that "You can't manage what you can't measure" (a misquote attributed to Deming, who on the contrary declared that one of the seven deadly diseases of management is running a company on visible figures alone).
It's certainly true that if you have a goal and you make changes without trying to somehow evaluate the effect of those changes, then your progress towards that goal will be a random walk.
But when you choose what to measure, you also choose the conclusions of your experiments. In U.S. schools we measure test scores, so students learn how to take tests rather than how to think and be creative (what we actually need). MBA schools teach their students to measure quarterly profits, so other company values go by the wayside when they get infected by such MBAs.
The parable of the "furniture police" from Peopleware is an extreme example of this. Someone in management (probably an MBA) creates a spreadsheet that shows how much money the company can save by shrinking cubicle size. The MBA has only been trained to measure the quarterly effects of changes, and so is unable to see any other effects -- effects that can be far more damaging to the company's bottom line than the short term savings from rearranging the furniture. I think Einstein's greatest quote is "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."
When you decide what to measure, you set your goal; you predetermine what is going to be important. True science must repeatedly cast a broad net and let the data show the way. Management is not a science, so we cannot draw scientific conclusions (we must discard Taylorism and all its descendants). And yet we must somehow muddle forward and figure out how to do things better and better.
In my mind, the only measure of any worth is, "Does this make you happy?" Indeed, what is the point of any other?
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