How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business, 3rd Edition

Preface to the Third Edition

I can’t speak for all authors, but I feel that a book—especially one based largely on ongoing research—is never really finished. This is precisely what editions are for. In the time since the publication of the second edition of this book, I continue to come across fascinating published research about the power and oddities of human decision making. And as my small firm continues to apply the methods in this book to real-world problems, I have even more examples I can use to illustrate the concepts. Feedback from readers and my experience explaining these concepts to many audiences have also helped me refine the message.

Of course, if the demand for the book wasn’t still strong six years after the first edition was published, Wiley and I wouldn’t be quite as incentivized to publish another edition. We also found this book, written explicitly for business managers, was catching on in universities. Professors from all over the world were contacting me to say they were using this book in a course they were teaching. In some cases it was the primary text—even though How to Measure Anything (HTMA) was never written as a textbook. Now that we see this growing area of interest, Wiley and I decided we should also create an accompanying workbook and instructor materials with this edition. Instructor materials are available at www.wiley.com.

In the time since I wrote the first edition of HTMA, I’ve written a second edition (2010) and two other titles—The Failure ...