If there were a tournament for Peter Drucker’s best-known dictum then “what gets measured gets managed” would make it to the finals, even though nobody seems able to pin the saying directly to the Viennese-born management thinker. Repeated misattribution has gilded the truism and propelled it into the Management Maxim Hall of Fame.
En route, unfortunately, the assumption has taken root that everything can be measured. Worse, anything that does not submit to mathematical evaluation need not be managed, or is simply unmanageable.
This is the most prominent example of a widespread phenomenon: the tendency to pay more attention to hard facts, targets, outcomes and initiatives than to soft factors that are equally, or sometimes more, important.