The Tyranny of Metrics
Ratings7
Average rating3.4
15
Ratings7
Average rating3.4
How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.
Reviews with the most likes.
Metrics are used everywhere and you must have encountered (or have been evaluated on) some quirky or even stupid ones. This book attacks this almost religious view a lot of us have on metrics and question their so-called objectivity, highlighting a lot of cases where metrics provoked really bad impacts (from keeping patients artificially alive to ensure they last enough days to not count toward one to refusing to believe rape victims to avoid increasing a sector's crimes number). It's a great wake up call asking us to reflect on how usage of metrics, when and how to use them and to bring back our power of judgment and qualitative analysis in the face of the sacred numbers.
A truly must read for anyone nowadays I would say.
Poorly written and poorly argued. I wanted to like this book but it turned out to be repetitive and without substance. Sad, because we do need a much better discussion around metrics.
