Measurement, Management, and Axioms

 

In my seemingly endless attempts at stamping out poor management science scholarship, I have, on many occasions, encountered ideas that leave me with a case of epistemological heartburn. Many of these ideas have to do with commonly-accepted management axioms, both valid and not. For example, the adage “if it can’t be measured, it can’t be managed,” variously attributed to Deming or Drucker, came under fire in an article I read recently on a prominent business website. In this article by Liz Ryan, entitled ‘If You Can’t Measure It, You Can’t Manage It’: Not True (sic), dated February 10 of last year, one of the pull quotes is:

A typical ridiculous, unquestioned business adage is “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” That’s BS on the face of it, because the vast majority of important things we manage at work aren’t measurable, from the quality of our new hires to the confidence we instill in a fledgling manager.[i]

The rest of the article is similar in tone and content, meaning that it’s something of a Banjo Minnow[ii] to me. Besides the suspect management science assertions, one would think that someone in the chain of publishing command, from the author through the editorial staff, would have known that single quote marks are only used when quoting someone within an existing quotation, not to mention the inelegance of using the particular acronym she chose.

Hyperbolic writing styles and punctuation difficulties aside, let’s take a look at the central assertion, shall we? As I have oft asserted in this blog, my version of the Pareto Rule as it applies to Management Information Systems is that the 20% worst managers who have access to 80% of the information they need to obviate a given decision will consistently out-perform the 80^th percentile best managers who have access to only 20% of the necessary information. Okay, so how does one obtain this information? It has to have three characteristics:

• It has to be timely (if the necessary information arrives too late, it’s worthless),
• It has to be accurate (wrong information is worse than worthless, since it can be misleading), and
• It has to be relevant (the predicted rate of return on a project that’s headed south is the essence of irrelevance, for example).

The second bullet pertains to the measurement and management axiom. For “the vast majority” of management decisions, some kind of accurate measurement is needed to avoid a bad, or even cataclysmic, call. A short list includes:

• Procuring material (an accurate inventory of existing material)
• Hiring personnel (the precise date they can start on the project, the availability of work space, the ability of the organization to meet payroll, etc..)
• Expanding or contracting facility capacity (how much of existing facilities are currently being used, contract backlog, proposal backlog, win rate by project type, among many others),
• Which projects to bid (win rate by project type, win rate by customer, historical cost/schedule performance by project type, availability of qualified personnel, current disposition of likely competitors, again, among many other data elements).

I could go on (and often do), but you see my point. To categorically downgrade entire information streams as male bovine droppings based on whether or not they can be accurately quantified is to plunge into management science alchemy, and with complete abandon. By attempting to conflate the quantifiable with the irrelevant, the article ends up making several invalid conclusions, and attempts to buttress them with bombast (and several amateurish cartoon drawings).

And therein lies my heartburn. Management science, as a field of scholarship, is already considered suspect by adherents to the hard sciences. To further a hypothesis with little more than primitive cartoons and hyperventilated prose just feeds in to the notion that MIS theory is just so much bloviating, made all the worse by a prominent brand name having published it. If the high-profile management publications are going to allow their authors to market in shoddy business theories, we should probably expect multiple series on risk management soon.

[i] Ryan, Liz, retrieved from Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/sites/lizryan/2014/02/10/if-you-cant-measure-it-you-cant-manage-it-is-bs/, November 21, 2015, 19:29 MST.

[ii] A “banjo minnow” is a fishing lure that was advertised as being irresistible to fish. In a demonstration, a banjo minnow was dangled in front of a bass in an aquarium, with a voice-over assuring viewers that the bass was not hungry. Nevertheless, the fish snapped up the lure.