The Tyranny of Metrics

How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives

Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics...