[1/3] The Tyranny of Metrics (Tyranny of indicators) (Category Management)

This is an interesting book by Muller Jerry. 2018 The Princeton University Press and 2020 She was transferred to Alpine last year. I liked the title, which goes against the standard approach to measuring everything and everything.) As a result, the book resembles the structure of a scientific article. And when I started reading this book, it was easy to recognize the problems that the author famously described. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a goal, it ceases to be a good measure. As a result, the author does not propose to abandon the indicators, but rather says that in addition to them, there should be qualitative indicators and the opinion of people who are versed in the topic who make decisions. Otherwise, it will be like XSolla, where employees were fired with the argument that “big date” showed their disengagement.

Here's the content of the book. 0) Introduction - the author talks about how he, working in the field of education as a professor and head of the department, was forced to submit more and more reports as the education system was hung with metrics. Then he became interested in the history of the issue and eventually this book turned out. 1) Setting the problem In this part, the author talks about the obsession with indicators and what this can lead to. He does this in chapters with a brief description of the problem and a list of characteristic errors. 2) History of the problem Since the author is a teaching with interests in history, economics, and politics, he delves deeply into the history of the issue and tells about it. Origin of the reward system depending on the outcome (pay for performance) Why quantitative indicators have become so popular Principals, agents, motivation (internal)

• Philosophy and criticism 3) Can quantitative assessments be applied to everything? Here the author analyzes the results of excessive quantitative evaluation using specific examples.
• In education - the author disassembles colleges and universities Schools - the author talks about foreign experience, but we can all see the results of the exam Health care - here the author shows how the rating of surgeons based on successful operations leads to the fact that they abandon complex operations ~~They want to go straight to the cemetery.~~ Law enforcement - here the goal in reducing crime leads to the fact that some crimes are classified as less serious, which are not included in the rating or simply do not respond to some appeals Armed Forces - here the race for indicators is especially harmful in scenarios against terrorists, insurgents and other irregulars
• Business and finance - here the author passes through KPI, OKR, remembers the acceleration of indicators for the joy of investors, falsification of reporting. As a result, managers often focus on operational performance and stop thinking about development strategies. Charity and assistance to other countries - the author says that business methods do not work very well here, since those involved in charity often focus on their internal motivation, and external KPIs begin to wash it away:) 4) Excursions. Sometimes transparency is the enemy of performance. He does this through politics, diplomacy, intelligence and marriage:) 5) Conclusions. First, the author talks about the unforeseen but predictable consequences of the fascination with indicators, and then talks about when and how to apply quantitative indicators. I will talk about this part separately later.

In general, I liked the book very much, as I often see the problems described by the author and try to fix them. Ironically, the product analytics and a/b platform for controlled experimentation, as well as the metric store, where product metrics for the entire organization are to be counted, are now in my unit, which means that the correct application of data is partly my professional task:)

Continuation in next post.

#Data #Statistics #Management #Leadership #Processes