The McGraw-Hill 36-Hour Course: Operations Management

CHAPTER 3DESIRED RESULTS

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

As I write this chapter, I cannot help but recall two important life lessons from my early career. The first came from my very first professor—in the first class meeting—in my M.B.A. program. He walked into the lecture hall, put his materials down on the front desk, and said without any introduction, “Accountants measure irrelevancies with precision.” This was strongly reinforced years later, when Goldratt and Cox first published the book The Goal and lambasted measurement systems that focused on individual efficiencies, machine utilizations, balancing capacities, and other counterproductive measures. Just because ...