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The Tyranny of Metrics Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Jerry Z. Muller (Author), Matthew Josdal (Narrator), Tantor Audio (Publisher)

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How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens our schools, medical care, businesses, and government

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. The result is a tyranny of metrics that threatens the quality of our lives and most important institutions.

In this timely and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage our obsession with metrics is causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from education, medicine, business and finance, government, the police and military, and philanthropy and foreign aid, this brief and accessible book explains why the seemingly irresistible pressure to quantify performance distorts and distracts, whether by encouraging "gaming the stats" or "teaching to the test". That's because what can and does get measured is not always worth measuring, may not be what we really want to know, and may draw effort away from the things we care about.

Along the way, we learn why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But metrics can be good when used as a complement to - rather than a replacement for - judgment based on personal experience, and Muller also gives examples of when metrics have been beneficial. Complete with a checklist of when and how to use metrics, The Tyranny of Metrics is an essential corrective to a rarely questioned trend that increasingly affects us all.

Listening Length

5 hours and 22 minutes
Author

Jerry Z. Muller
Narrator

Matthew Josdal
Audible release date

April 24, 2018
Language

English
Publisher

Tantor Audio
ASIN

B07C31JTH5
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	5 hours and 22 minutes
Author	Jerry Z. Muller
Narrator	Matthew Josdal
Whispersync for Voice	Ready
Audible.com Release Date	April 24, 2018
Publisher	Tantor Audio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B07C31JTH5
Best Sellers Rank	#166,052 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #312 in Business Statistics #669 in Public Policy (Audible Books & Originals) #1,549 in Business Management (Audible Books & Originals)

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Neurasthenic

Intelligent, thoughtful, a pleasure to read, and in the spirit of The Death of Common Sense

Reviewed in the United States on August 9, 2022

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I loved this book from page one through very nearly the end. The examples are for the most part telling and memorable, relating how aspects of modern society from business to education to medicine to charity to government service have been seduced by the gospel that nothing is worth achieving unless it can be quantified and reported, and how in nearly every case results have been perverted and missions have been cheapened as a result.

The discussion of how even for-profit businesses have been hurt by an obsession with metrics seemed at first incongruous and perhaps a bridge too far, but then when one considers insane practices like stack ranking of employees and the damage done to great firms like General Electric as a result, it's clear that Muller is right. Even in finance, the one industry where in theory a single metric (profitability) might most accurately define the mission of a firm, compensating employees on the basis of simple metrics can lead to perversions like the Wells Fargo accounts scandal.

In fields like foreign aid and peacekeeping by the military, where aims are more nuanced and the connections between one's actions and the intended result more variable between scenarios, the costs of metric obsession are correspondingly higher.

The final chapter of the book, which tries to draw conclusions from what has come before, is weaker than the rest. Anybody who reads the book will draw conclusions on his or her own; Muller's synopsis adds little. Nonetheless, the book is an easy five stars.

2 people found this helpful

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Ian Mann

decisions based on big data are useful and necessary

Reviewed in the United States on May 11, 2018

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The author cites as a primary reason for many contemporary organizations functioning less well than they ought to, with diminishing productivity and frustrated employees, as the “metric fixation.”
Professor Muller teaches at the Catholic University of America in Washington. His interest in the effects of metrics was sparked by his institution, (as other academic institutions,) being rewarded or penalized by government funders, based on how they performed against a set of imposed metrics.
Underlying this approach is the dictum of the 19th century physicist, Lord Kelvin: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” More recently, we have the Tom Peters’ motto, “What gets measured gets done.” From this, many have concluded that only that which can be counted, really counts.
How wrong.
This book is not about the evils of measuring, but about excessive and inappropriate measurement. Muller’s critique ranges from medicine to education at all levels. From policing, public services, charitable organizations, and business. I will focus only on business.
The fixation on metrics is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience, with standardized measurement. Judgment is demeaned as being “personal, subjective, and self-interested.”
Clearly, decisions based on big data are useful and necessary. This is obvious when the experience of any single practitioner, is likely to be too limited to develop an intuitive and reliable feel for the most effective method or remedy. Statistical analysis can sometimes discover that neglected characteristics, are more significant than the intuitive understanding of experience, believed them to be.
Checklists are hugely valuable in fields as different as airlines and medicine. However, these checklists are standardized procedures for action under specific conditions. I am a strong proponent of checklists.
So, what is the problem? It is “the belief that it is possible and desirable to replace judgment, acquired by personal experience and talent, with numerical indicators of comparative performance based upon standardized data.”
To make matters worse, the ‘metric fixation’ believes that the best way to motivate people in organizations, is by attaching monetary or reputational rewards and penalties for their performance.
The ‘metric fixation’ has unintended negative consequences. “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”
Most organizations have multiple purposes, and what is measured and rewarded tends to become the focus of attention, at the expense of other essential goals. For starters – gathering metrics seem to waste more and more time and resources.
Muller lists seven recurring flaws that will assist in separating the necessary from the misleading or distracting. The list serves as an alert.
The seduction to measure the most easily measurable, is ever present. However, what is most easily and simply measured is rarely what is most important. The important and desirable outcomes are most often complex. Focusing measurement on just one responsibility or goal, leads to deceptive results.
Organizations are inclined to measure what they’ve spent, rather than what they have produced -the process rather than product. This is especially true where the product is complex and multi-faceted.
When information is standardized, it can seem organized and simplified. This makes it easy to compare people and institutions. The downside is that this sort of measurement often hides the degraded quality of the information, now that it is stripped of context, history, and meaning.
‘Gaming’ the metrics can be achieved in many ways. The successes can be creamed off by excluding cases where success is more difficult to achieve. A sales closing rate can be 100% only because the salesperson is not prospecting widely.
Numbers can be improved by lowering standards. Pass rates are higher when the standard for passing is lowered – even though the purpose of rating passes is to educate.
The results can also be improved through omission or distortion of data. Police forces can “reduce” crime rates by booking felonies as misdemeanours, or by deciding not to note reported crimes at all.
‘Cheating’ is one step beyond gaming the metrics. It is a phenomenon whose frequency tends to increase, based on to the importance of the metric being reported, to the individual or business.
The metric fixation has had a long history in business. It started in 1911 when an American engineer, Frederick Taylor, coined the term “scientific management”. His context was pig iron in factories, and his goal was to increase efficiency by standardizing and speeding up work on the factory floor, to create mass production.
We have come a long way since 1911. Many of our institutions are large; they are almost all complex, made up of dissimilar parts, that defy a Taylorist perspective. In so many parts of business, we make decisions despite having limited time and ability to deal with the information overload.
Metrics are a tempting means to deal with matters beyond our immediate comprehension. However, this encourages a distrust of the experience and judgment of employees. Not to mention that all the time spent reporting, meeting, and coordinating, leaves little time for actual doing.
The autonomy of those lower in the organizational hierarchy who may have doubts about metric-based innovations, are too often dismissed as irrational or as having a self-interested “resistance to change.”
Intangible factors aren’t easily quantified if the work is not repetitive, uncreative, and involves standardized commodities or services. In our lifetime, technologies such as robotics and artificial intelligence will make such jobs rare.
It can be dangerously misleading to use metrics to measure the ability to come up with new ideas and better ways to do things. Similarly, it can be dangerously misleading to use metrics for the exchange of ideas and resources with colleagues; for the ability to engage in teamwork, to mentor subordinates, to relate to suppliers or customers, and more.
Much to ponder.
Readability Light ----+ Serious
Insights High -+--- Low
Practical High ----+ Low

*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update.

5 people found this helpful

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Andrew Everett

metric fixation

Reviewed in the United States on July 17, 2019

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“This book argues that while they are a potentially valuable tool, the virtues of accountability metrics have been oversold, and their costs are often underappreciated.” There are chapters on the dysfunction of “metric fixation” in colleges and universities; schools; medicine; policing; the military; business; and philanthropy. Problems include gaming the system, costs exceeding benefits, and diverting effort from the core mission. A major theme is metrics as a substitute for competent judgment.

“The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement… With all that time spent reporting, meeting, and coordinating, there is little time left for actual doing. This drain on time and effort is exacerbated by the tendency of executives under the spell of metric fixation to distrust the experiences judgment of those under them.”

“There is often an unexamined faith that amassing data and sharing it widely within the organization will result in improvements of some sort—even if much information has to be denuded of nuance and context to turn it into easily transferred ‘data.’”

“Judgment is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis… A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.”

Colleges and Universities

The longest chapter deals with colleges and universities, where the author feels the pain most directly. Muller is a history professor at Catholic University of America.

“In an attempt to obtain ‘value,’ successive British administrations have created a series of government agencies charged with evaluating the country’s universities… There are audits of teaching quality, such as the ‘Teaching Quality Assessment,’ evaluated largely on the extent to which various procedures are followed and paperwork filed, few of which have much to do with actual teaching… A mushroom-like growth of administrative staff has occurred… The search for more data means more data managers, more bureaucracy, more expensive software systems. Ironically, in the name of controlling costs, expenditures wax.”

“In academia as elsewhere, that which gets measured gets gamed.”

“In addition to expenditures that do nothing to raise the quality of teaching or research, the growing salience of rankings has led to ever new varieties of gaming through creaming and improving numbers through omission or distortion of data.” The book explains how American law schools manipulate their USNWR rankings.

“Colleges, both public and private, are measured and rewarded based in part on their graduation rates, which are one of the criteria by which colleges are ranked, and in some cases, remunerated… There is pressure on professors—sometimes overt, sometimes tacit—to be generous in awarding grades. An ever-larger portion of the teaching faculty comprises adjunct instructors—and an adjunct who fails a substantial portion of her class (even if their performance merits it) is less likely to have her contract renewed.”

“When individual faculty members, or whole departments, are judged by the number of publications, whether in the form of articles or books, the incentive is to produce more publications, rather than better ones… Only citations in the journals within the author’s discipline were counted. That too was problematic, since it tended to shortchange works of trans-disciplinary interest.”

Schools

An unintended consequence of K-12 testing-and-accountability legislation is that “students too often learn test-taking strategies rather than substantive knowledge… Because students in English are taught to answer multiple choice and short-answer questions based on brief passages, the students are worse at reading extended texts and writing extended essays.”

“An emphasis on measured performance through standardized tests creates another perverse outcome, as Campbell’s Law predicts: it destroys the predictive validity of the tests themselves. Tests of performance are designed to evaluate the knowledge and ability that students have acquired in their general education. When that education becomes focused instead on developing the students’ performance on the tests, the test no longer measures what it was created to evaluate.”

“The costs of trying to use metrics to turn schools into gap-closing factories are therefore not only monetary. The broader mission of schools to instruct in history and in civics is neglected as attention is focused on attempting to improve the reading and math scores of lower-performing groups.”

Medicine

Do the reported numbers mean what you think they mean? The WHO’s World Health Report 2000 ranked U.S. healthcare system 37th among the nations of the world. “Scott W. Atlas, a physician and healthcare analyst, has scrutinized and contextualized those claims, which turn out to be more than a little misleading. Most of us assume that the WHO rankings measured the overall level of health. But actual health outcomes accounted for only 25 percent of the ranking scale. Half of the points awarded were for egalitarianism: 25 percent for ‘health distribution,’ and another 25 percent for ‘financial fairness,’ where ‘fairness’ was defined as having everyone pay the same percent of their income for healthcare. That is, only a system which the richer you are, the more you pay for healthcare was deemed fair. The criterion, in short, was ideological. The fact that there was a number attached (37th) gave it the appearance of objectivity and reliability. But in fact, the overall performance ranking is deceptive.”

Conclusions

“Indeed, the ease of measuring may be inversely proportional to the significance of what is measured. To put it another way, ask yourself, is what you are measuring a proxy for what you really want to know? If the information is not very useful or not a good proxy for what you’re really aiming at, you’re probably better off not measuring it.”

“What are the costs of acquiring the metrics? … Every moment you or your colleagues or employees are devoting to the production of metrics is time not devoted to the activities being measured.”

“Measurements are more likely to be meaningful when they are developed from the bottom up, with input from teachers, nurses, and the cop on the beat. That means asking those with tacit knowledge that comes from direct experience to provide suggestions about how to develop appropriate performance standards… Remember, that a system of measured performance will work to the extent that the people being measured believe in its worth.”

Muller summarizes with 10 unintended but predictable negative consequences of metric fixation: “Goal displacement through diversion of effort to what gets measured; promoting short-termism; costs in employee time; diminishing utility… [as] the marginal costs of assembling and analyzing the metrics exceed the marginal benefits; rule cascades [in response to gaming and cheating]; rewarding luck; discouraging risk-taking; discouraging innovation; discouraging cooperation [by promoting competition]; degradation of work; and costs to productivity.”

“In the end, there is no silver bullet, no substitute for actually knowing one’s subject and one’s organization, which is partly a matter of experience and partly a matter of unquantifiable skill. Many matters of importance are too subject to judgment and interpretation to be solved by standardized metrics. Ultimately, the issue is not one of metrics versus judgment, but metrics as informing judgment, which includes knowing how much weight to give to metrics, recognizing their characteristic distortions, and appreciating what can’t be measured. In recent debates, too many politicians, business leaders, policymakers, and academic officials have lost sight of that.”

7 people found this helpful

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MZunigaP

A great book by every measure!

Reviewed in the United States on March 6, 2024

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Very informative reading on the unintended consequences of measuring everything, everywhere, all the time.

The point about transparency did surprise me, but I totally agree!

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Luca .T

Wow!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 31, 2022

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Super interesting and thought-provoking book about the metrics that regulate most of our societies, from internet, to medicine, law and order and economics.
I feel I learnt so much and the language is always simplified and easy to digest.

JUAN DIEGO LOPEZ CARDENAS

De obligatoria lectura para cualquier gestor

Reviewed in Spain on April 29, 2021

Verified Purchase

Este libro explica e ilustra con multitud de ejemplos por qué los bonus por resultados sólo pueden utilizarse en actividades puramente mecánicas, en las que no es necesario pensar.
Lamentablemente cada vez quedan menos de estos trabajos. Si puedes gestionarlo con métricas, puedes automatizarlo por completo.
Para el resto de actividades, las métricas son contraproducentes. Este libro te explicará exactamente por qué.
Elevado riesgo de depresión si trabajas en una multinacional, leer con precaución

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Saul Noriega

General

Reviewed in Mexico on January 10, 2020

Verified Purchase

El tamaño del libro es perfecto, al igual que la calidad de las hojas. El contenido del libro es facil de entender - Esta en Inglés. En si no propone una solución a la tirania de las metricas, pero si profundiza en como surgieron y como estan siendo aplicadas. La solucion pueden buscarla en libros que hablen acerca de New Performance Management

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Livro

Reviewed in Brazil on August 12, 2019

Verified Purchase

Excelente

ASA

Highly recommended

Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2018

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An excellent book. Clear, coherent writing and very interesting.

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