How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of "Intangibles" in Business, Second Edition

Chapter 2. An Intuitive Measurement Habit: Eratosthenes, Enrico, and Emily

Setting out to become a master of measuring anything seems pretty ambitious, and a journey like that needs some inspirational examples to keep us motivated. What we need are some measurement "heroes"—individuals who saw measurement solutions intuitively and often solved difficult problems with surprisingly simple methods. Fortunately, we have many people—at the same time inspired and inspirational—to show us what such a skill would look like. It's revealing, however, to find out that so many of the best examples seem to be from outside of business. In fact, this book will borrow heavily from outside of business to reveal measurement methods that can be applied to business.

Here are just a few people who, while they weren't working on measurement within business, can teach business people quite a lot about what an intuitive feel for quantitative investigation should look like.

• In ancient Greece, a man estimated the circumference of Earth by looking at the different lengths of shadows in different cities at noon and by applying some simple geometry.

• A Nobel Prize-winning physicist taught his students how to estimate by estimating the number of piano tuners in Chicago.

• A nine-year-old girl set up an experiment that debunked the growing medical practice of "therapeutic touch" and, two years later, became the youngest person ever to be published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).

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