many unintended consequences of the misuse of metrics that Muller cites are the following:
Inducing people whose performance is measured to divert their efforts to what gets measured;
Promoting short-termism (as in Wall Street's obsessive preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports at the expense of companies' long-term health);
Discouraging innovation and risk-taking;
Sidetracking nonprofit staff members (or corporate employees, for that matter) from focusing on the mission that motivates them; and
** Forcing employees to spend time logging data instead of doing their jobs
Muller concludes The Tyranny of Metrics with a useful checklist of ten questions that any manager should ask when considering the application of metrics at work.
the 'puzzle' of how parts fit with an overall whole presumes clear-cut spatial boundaries among underlying components, yet spatial nonlocality cautions against this view. Temporal nonlocality further complicates this picture: how does one describe an entity whose constituent parts are not even coexistent?
at what point can the whole country of Norway just go on vacation and live off the interest?
"An update on the fund’s website showed the Government Pension Fund Global’s value reaching 10 trillion Norwegian crowns for the first time at 0857 GMT — more than $200,000 for every man, woman and child in Norway."
Even the quantum physicist Richard Feynman admitted, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics."
yet through the tools of culture and society were able to accomplish so much more than mere biology allows a single individual to fathom.
"Biologically, we are no different than we were 40,000 years ago, but now we know about bacteria and viruses, DNA and molecules, supernovas and black holes, the full range of the electromagnetic spectrum and a wide array of other strange things."
"The real world here is pretty hard,” he said. “The real world out there is even harder, and the real world in Times Square is supremely difficult.”
“Our view is, we can’t do all of them,” he said. “Let’s start with places we can get autonomous vehicles to work reasonably in the near term.”
we've all accepted profit over morality for too long. clearly keeping silent and looking the other way to China's abuses is not a policy that's worked for anyone in the western world. we're all complicit.
"It means that the N.B.A. has weighed China’s human rights abuses against China’s potential as a source of revenue, and it has decided that it can live with state policies like the detention of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Muslims in the northwestern province of Xinjiang."
"American executives and policymakers initially reconciled themselves to following China’s rules by arguing that China’s turn toward capitalism, and its exposure to the United States, would gradually lead toward democracy and a greater respect for human rights. They argued, in effect, that silence was the most productive form of criticism.
It should now be clear that silence is merely complicity, no more or less.
It is the moral price the N.B.A. and other businesses are paying for making money in China."
wild world we live in where companies gladly destroy free speech and fairness to make a buck.
"Under the game's rules, players can be removed for behaviour that results in public disrepute, offends the public or damages its image, Blizzard said, adding that the two hosts were also fired."
if our consumer patterns are the driving force behind devaluing our own labour, who's to blame?