How to Measure Anything
It’s appropriate now (and, undoubtedly, throughout this blog) to talk about the great book How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard. Amazon recommended this book to me when I ordered Stephen Few’s Information Dashboard Design (another winner) and based on the title I though “how could I go wrong?”
Short version: this book is awesome.
Longer version: anyone whose job includes finding out how to measure stuff should read this book. From early in the book here’s a key idea that has significantly updated the way I think about measurement and I think about measurement A LOT.
The purpose of measurement is to reduce uncertainty. Did you get that? Read it again: The purpose of measurement is to reduce uncertainty. Hubbard goes on to talk about the few circumstances where you can actually remove uncertainty, including examples like “How much change is in my pocket?” and few others.
In a business setting, the task is to remove uncertainty to a point where action can be taken (this is some of my thinking slipping in here, but Hubbard didn’t seem to disagree). Sometimes when I get in conversations with clients about measurement, before they put a single graph on paper, they want to ensure that they have an enterprise-wide, watertight measurement program. I always tell them we can work together to get the ball rolling, get a stake in the sand, get some sort of hackneyed cliche in place so that the real work can be done (measurement isn’t the real work…more on that later). But Hubbard’s explanation is so much more elegant.
Let’s reduce some uncertainty, shall we?
More on Hubbard later…I’ve got two dashboards to design this week and it’s Wednesday (yeek!)
~Geek~
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment