MEASURING WHAT MATTERS

THEVIETNAM WAR was tragic, T it went on from 1955 to 1975. By 1966, the United States had dropped three million tonnes of bombs on the Ho Chi Minh Trail – more than what was dropped on Germany and Japan during World War II.

So how did the US continue this disastrous campaign for over 20 years? Behind this was Robert McNamara - Secretary of Defense in the US government- and the system of metrics he created. Success was measured in terms of body counts and kill ratios.

Robert McNamara was a numbers guy, he believed numbers could solve all problems. During the war, McNamara tracked every combat statistic he could, the Pentagon set up dashboards to measure progress, the primary data being "kill ratios", expressed as a ratio of casualties - Viet Cong against the US.

McNamara felt that he could comprehend what was happening on the ground by staring at spreadsheets so he created a mountain of analytics to guide the war’s strategy. In one of the episodes of the Netflix documentary Vietnam War a despondent war veteran lamented: “If you can’t measure what’s important, you make what you can measure important”. This is also true of business and the metrics we measure.

And the paradox today is that with an unprecedented amount of data, tools, and analytics at our disposal, we are overwhelmed with reports and find it difficult to make meaning of it all. For instance, measuring impact of marketing interventions has never been easy and the digital revolution has compounded complexity, drastically increasing the number of touch points between companies and consumers while raising the expectations of senior management, among others, that everything is measurable. New tools and techniques are invented daily. So how does one wade through this complexity and the dozens of reports we are being bombarded with? Here are some tips I’ve found useful.