RE: Article on ISO & Quotas

[Rip Stauffer <rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com>]

"You cannot manage what you don't measure, You cannot achieve what you 
don't measure (Lord Kelvin)."

This one crops up again every once in a while...I think what we maybe need
is a good operational definition of "management" in this context (or maybe
"measurement"). Dr. Deming called this "a costly myth" and pointed out time
and again that there are numerous things that must be managed that cannot be
measured. 

Certainly, measurement makes understanding of process or system behavior
simpler. Having processes in statistical control gives us predictability,
keeps planning realistic, steers us away from goals plucked from mid-air or
imagination, helps eliminate MBOs and hopefully guides us toward some
replacement for performance evaluation. 

However, there are many things that cannot be measured accurately or
meaningfully, and many of these things are vital to our businesses. Can
anyone actually say they've found an accurate measure for the long-term
effects of a particular training course on organizational behavior? Can you
actually isolate those effects from the other system variable that influence
it? Maybe so, but I tend to doubt it. What were the effects of the last
meeting you had? Did you measure those? Probably not. Have you turned off
any customers lately? How much did that cost you--in market share, in
revenue, in productivity losses?

Perhaps what we do with these things is not "management," but it had better
be something. 

My own belief is that we quantify what it's possible to quantify, and the
rest we do the best way we know. Things get better or they get worse. If
they get better, the combinations of things that we did probably
contributed. As we go, we find new ways to measure, new causal connections,
new leading measures; we build new models that work for a while. This is not
a mechanistic, deterministic world--some measures will always elude us. But
if we measure what we can and continue to learn, we will probably do very
well.

Best regards to all,

Rip

Rip Stauffer, Senior Consultant
BlueFire Partners
1300 Fifth St. Towers, 150 So. Fifth St.
Minneapolis, MN 55402
612-344-1027
mailto:rstauffer@bluefirepartners.com
http://www.bluefirepartners.com/