Valjoow

I’ve been known to have opined, sometimes in words that have not always been the most diplomatic euphemisms, on the idea of Value in e.g., goal setting for IT-departments. To name just one example, where those that should know better, want ROI but for the R have nothing but ‘Value’, that’s what you deliver when you deliver what The Business wants.

Now, “As the business innovator W. Edwards Deming taught, if management sets only quantitative targets and makes people’s jobs depend on meeting them, “They will likely meet the targets — even if they have to destroy the enterprise to do it.” In Deming’s estimation, more than 90 percent of the conditions that affect a company’s performance can’t be easily tracked and measured. Yet managers spend more than 90 percent of their time monitoring and analyzing some form of measures; most notably, time tracking” (here).
Also, “The perception that the world is quantitative and that business is therefore mechanistic has for the past fifty years shaped all the variants of strategic planning, financial analysis, budgeting, cost management, and management accounting that have been taught by graduate business schools and practiced in large organizations. Executives versed in such practices and who believe that reality is defined by quantitative measurements are like the puppies who believe that the fence defines reality” (same).

What can be measured, is of no value; what is of value, cannot be measured.

Yeah I know a few, a precious few circumstances where Value is in the measurable, and there, sometimes the milliseconds are the long run. Short run is shorter, indeed… But for most, ditch the idea that you know what Value is about. Re-engineer your organisation indeed [even if that might be painful as you’ll probably have to transform irrecognisably], and conform to the original theory of firm. Then, durable success may be yours. The times, they are a’changing ..!

Cheers, and:

[Art, as a prime example; Barça]