A Costly Myth

Leadership gurus have enemies... even the nice ones.

Like Peter Drucker. I recall being force-fed Drucker day after day, week after week from a control freak of a boss who borrowed every single idea they ever had but never had another thing to learn. (But that's another story.)

And one motto (leadership gurus tend to quote well and have everything from memes to those cross-stitched, framed quotes in CEOs studies), was the "If you can't measure it, you can't improve it" line from Drucker.

It's as simple as saying it's just your opinion unless you put pins in the map, track and measure.

But that's different from tracking apples and oranges... or tracking and measuring the right things... and that takes us back into the land of opinion.

So, how do we escape the land of opinion?

What if we can't?

What if some things can't be measured in the same way as others?

That's what fans of W. Edmund Deming's call the costly myth... because some things can't be measured but still must be managed.

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