An interview with Jerry Z. Muller, author of The Tyranny of Metrics
What’s the main idea?
We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the belief in
so many organizations that scientific management means replacing
judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized
measures of performance, and then rewarding or punishing
individuals and organizations based upon those measures. The
buzzwords of metric fixation are all around us: “metrics,”
“accountability,” “assessment,” and “transparency.” Though often
characterized as “best practice,” metric fixation is in fact often
counterproductive, with costs to individual satisfaction with work,
organizational effectiveness, and economic growth.
The Tyranny of Metrics treats metric fixation as the organizational equivalent of The Emperor’s New Clothes. It helps explain why metric fixation has become so popular, why it is so often counterproductive, and why some people have an interest in pushing it. It is a book that analyzes and critiques a dominant fashion in contemporary organizational culture, with an eye to making life in organizations more satisfying and productive.
Can you give a few examples of the “tyranny of
metrics?”
Sure. In medicine, you have the phenomenon of “surgical report
cards” that purport to show the success rates of surgeons who
perform a particular procedure, such as cardiac operations. The
scores are publicly reported. In an effort to raise their scores,
surgeons were found to avoid operating on patients whose
complicated circumstances made a successful operation less likely.
So, the surgeons raised their scores. But some cardiac patients who
might have benefited from an operation failed to get one—and died
as a result. That’s what we call “creaming”—only dealing with cases
most likely to be successful.
Then there is the phenomenon of goal diversion. A great deal of K-12 education has been distorted by the emphasis that teachers are forced to place on preparing students for standardized tests of English and math, where the results of the tests influence teacher retention or school closings. Teachers are instructed to focus class time on the elements of the subject that are tested (such as reading short prose passages), while ignoring those elements that are not (such as novels). Subjects that are not tested—including civics, art, and history—receive little attention.
Or, to take an example from the world of business. In 2011 the Wells Fargo bank set high quotas for its employees to sign up customers who were interested in one of its products (say, a deposit account) for additional services, such as overdraft coverage or credit cards. For the bank’s employees, failure to reach the quota meant working additional hours without pay and the threat of termination. The result: to reach their quotas, thousands of bankers resorted to low-level fraud, with disastrous effects for the bank. It was forced to pay a fortune in fines, and its stock price dropped.
Why is the book called The Tyranny of
Metrics?
Because it helps explain and articulate the sense of frustration
and oppression that people in a wide range of organizations feel at
the diversion of their time and energy to performance measurement
that is wasteful and counterproductive.
What sort of organizations does the book deal
with?
There are chapters devoted to colleges and universities, K-12
education, medicine and health care, business and finance,
non-profits and philanthropic organizations, policing, and the
military. The goal is not to be definitive about any of these
realms, but to explore instances in which metrics of measured
performance have been functional or dysfunctional, and then to draw
useful generalizations about the use and misuse of metrics.
What sort of a book is it? Does it belong to any particular
discipline or political ideology?
It’s a work of synthesis, drawing on a wide range of studies and
analyses from psychology, sociology, economics, political science,
philosophy, organizational behavior, history, and other fields. But
it’s written in jargon-free prose, that doesn’t require prior
knowledge of any of these fields. Princeton University Press has it
classified under “Business,” “Public Policy,” and “Current
Affairs.” That’s accurate enough, but it only begins to suggest the
ubiquity of the cultural pattern that the book depicts, analyzes,
and critiques. The book makes use of conservative, liberal,
Marxist, and anarchist authors—some of whom have surprising areas
of analytic convergence.
What’s the geographic scope of the book?
In the first instance, the United States. There is also a lot of
attention to Great Britain, which in many respects was at the
leading edge of metric fixation in the government’s treatment of
higher education (from the “Teaching Quality Assessment” through
the “Research Excellence Framework”), health care (the NHS) and
policing, under the rubric of “New Public Management.” From the US
and Great Britain, metric fixation—often carried by consultants
touting “best practice”—has spread to Continental Europe, the
Anglosphere, Asia, and especially China (where the quest for
measured performance and university rankings is having a
particularly pernicious effect on science and higher
education).
Is the book simply a manifesto against performance
measurement?
By no means. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from education
to medicine to the military, the book shows how measured
performance can be developed and used in positive ways.
Who do you hope will read the book?
Everyone who works in an organization, manages an organization, or
supervises an organization, whether in the for-profit, non-profit,
or government sector. Or anyone who wants to understand this
dominant organizational culture and its intrinsic weaknesses.