An old business adage warns: “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” However, obsessing over metrics often does more harm than good.

Indiana-based business consultant Joe Dager provides a classic restatement of this premise in a recent blog post:

Identifying, gathering and leveraging the right mix of metrics adds value to a project. Metrics provide a more factual and quantitative basis for describing how you are doing and what you can do better. Without at least some basic metric information, all discussions on performance and improvement are based on subjective evidence, perceptions and guesses.

This all sounds reasonable. After all, having a ruler which tells you how far you’ve come and how far you have yet to go provides perspective and incentive. Shouldn’t we use hard figures as much as possible?

Suppose you wanted to become a famous, fabulously rich movie star. Part of that success is choosing roles in top-grossing films. You might want to note the films of the biggest box office stars of all time, like Bruce Willis (ranked #11), Tom Cruise (#7) or Harrison Ford (#4). But you probably wouldn’t be interested in emulating the movie-making career of the number one box office star of all time. That’s because it’s a actor you’ve never heard of: Frank Welker, whose films have brought in nearly five billion dollars.

Welker is successful because he’s a voice actor, and has done bit parts and vocal sound effects in countless motion pictures. These include jobs in films like Raiders of the Lost Ark and Independence Day.  If you want  to do voices in Hollywood, he is the man to follow. Frank Welker’s success, however, demonstrates that there is more to winning than having the right measurement. Acting requires craft as well as sound decisions. The same is true in your business.

Whether you are trying to conquer the movies, survive marketing budget cuts or just trying to finish routine tasks, measurement is important. However, that famous quote is usually interpreted incorrectly. We must not forget that the most fundamental aspects of our ability to work cannot be measured: passion, talent and creativity. Leverage these qualities in your stakeholders to conduct measurement, workflow redesign and continuous improvement. Contact Slaughter Development to learn more.

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