The Perils of Metrics Misapplied

[JMA]

In business metrics are very important but they should always be seen as help to understand the means and to reach the goals, not as the mean and the goal itself bar the very basic ones as ROI, ROCE etc. Accounting & Controlling are surprisingly interesting fields with often most revealing and shocking findings. I remember how a board of a European company in which I wanted to invest quite some money offered an interest free 1 million € loan to it's members backed by the value of the convertible bond for which that offer was reserved. Getting the whole bond on less then 30 cents on the € was quite a business with that loaned money, considering the bonds shot up to 110 cents a year later and hover still above the 100 cents. Nice but of course like with options that loan was not listed among the expenses... Shareholder money is clearly interest-free and dilution is an imagined problem


In the military training the proper use of metrics should be much more difficult to implement then in business. The big problem of a heavy reliance are the big incentives to game the system, training for the score and 'making it work' to earn the benefits.

Business? Its a different world. One which needs to be tolerated and endured rather than savoured. Sydney Jary in the magnificent book '18 Platoon' explains the difference and why good military leaders have a problem adjusting to the 'false' world of business.

Let us now leave the service ethos, where leadership is appreciated and expected of those in authority. I went into business where I found an almost total absence of leadership qualities. There were only two exceptions, one a retired Brigadier REME, the other a Swiss machine tool manufacturer.

To succeed in business other characteristics - I will not dignify by calling them qualities - are required. To succeed you require energy, ambition, enthusiasm, plausibility and a degree of intolerant ruthlessness. A cocktail of egocentric characteristics which hardly inspires the trust of subordinates. It does, however, gain the confidence of clients. It sells.

As a final note on this... had I known when I was a young officer that I was fighting for (and soldiers were dying for) the protection of the assets and profits of the ethically and morally deprived we call 'the captains of industry' I would not have done it.