Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations
by Robert D. Austin, Tom DeMarco, Timothy Lister
Foreword
One of the insights that comes early in a reading of Rob Austin’s book, Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations, is that measurement is a potentially dangerous business. When you measure any indicator of performance, you incur a risk of worsening that performance. This is what Rob calls dysfunction.
In order to see why this happens, you need to remember that measurement is almost always part of an effort to achieve some goal. You can’t always measure all aspects of progress against the goal, so you settle for some surrogate parameter, one that seems to represent the goal closely and is simple enough to measure. So, for example, if the goal is long-term profitability, you may seek to achieve that goal by measuring and tracking ...
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