What Gets Measured...
Every institution obsesses over what’s measurable, be it circulation numbers or page views or profits or students’ marks or whatever. And almost all of us have complained that this mindset leads to the problem that V. F. Ridgway expressed so well: “What gets measured gets managed - even when it's pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so.” Of course, at the heart of this measurement mania lies the fear of the alternative: if it can’t be measured, does it become subjective? And once things are left to subjective assessments, will it become a free for all, where the lazy, the incompetent, the charlatans and the smooth talkers take over? As Siddhartha Mukherjee wrote in The Emperor of All Maladies , objectivity lies at the heart of everything that calls itself a science (quantum mechanics may feel like an exception since it straddles both objective and subjective worlds, but then again, it is insanely accurate when c...