Essay: Numbers, telling facts, accountability, management and success

Vince Lombardi

"If it doesn't matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?" - Vince Lombardi

Achievers and winners love numbers, telling facts and accountability. Losers (especially sore losers), ideologues, fanatics, and proud unteachable people hate numbers, telling facts and accountability.

The article Numbers matter; you can’t manage what you don’t measure states:

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Attention to numbers is important. Data is your friend. Facts are telling. Objective measurements are revealing. This discipline is especially important for managers and leaders, because you can’t manage what you don’t measure (This mantra is attributed to business consultant, Peter Drucker.). You can’t know whether or not you are successful unless success is defined and tracked. With a clearly established metric for success, you can quantify progress and adjust your process to produce desired outcomes. Without clear objectives, you’re stuck in a constant state of guessing. Not being able to measure the effect of a given set of actions would make it impossible to know if you should be doing more or less of those actions—or if you should be doing them at all. Imagine going on a diet but refusing to use a scale to monitor your progress. Granted, there are important things going on in an organization that are hard to quantify — people’s attitude, the role of intuition in making decisions—but these activities will ultimately affect the organization in ways that can be measured.

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Likewise, the article Logic and Math Two Essential Skills for Accountability and How You Use Them states:

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Accountability is a vital component for performance management. Accountability reflects an organization’s ability to explain the basis for its actions. When it comes to accountability you need both math and logic. Math quantifies and logic helps us understand the why and how. Accountability has a computational aspect. Therefore, you need mathematical skills to support any accountability initiative. What you measure is the foundation for how you will address accountability. These measures become the ingredients for your scorecards and dashboards, or other reporting tools used to monitor and communicate accountability. Many performance reports present numerical results but lack the logic. Without the logic, you are missing an important aspect of accountability. Logic plays an instrumental part in the construction and use of any performance report. The data chains, composed of measures, are based on observations and hypotheses. The chain must pass the logic test. If you think of each link or measure in the chain as a hypothesis, then each link must be based on facts and/or a pattern that has a degree of truth in the next link. If it does, then you can form a logical argument from which you will be able to draw a sound conclusion based on the facts and/or patterns.

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Quotes

"What gets measured gets managed." - Peter Drucker

See also

• Goal setting
• Performance goal
• Performance goal quotes
• Results orientation
• Deliberate practice
• How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking
• Falsifiable