Stupid like a Fox (News)

Be careful what you wish for, but be even more careful what you measure.

I was amazed to read this. It's a very, very sorry and instructive tale.http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/fd9ffd9c-dee5-11de-adff-00144feab49a.html

Especially because it shows the dangers of one particular kind of mistake that it's so easy for management to make, especially when there's measurement involved:

optimising the operations rather than process.

This is something that Shigeo Shingo warns against in his excellent book: "Zero Quality Control".

The executives who'd been parachuted into MySpace from News International had decided on a measurement to optimise: page views. There were making lots of money from page views. People who actually understood MySpace told them that they had to initially reduced the number of page views. The experience i.e. the overall process of interactive with the site, needed optimising. The News International executives resisted. They bogged down any attempts to reduce the number of page views in a laborious sign-off process. They did this for so long that MySpace lost any chance it had ever had of keeping up with facebook.

These super-smart executives just couldn't understand that the way to get more users (and hence, ultimately more page views) was to improve the experience and a very good way to improve the experience was to streamline it. They'd been given a measure they were going to optimise it.

Look around you now. Where can you see operations being optimised instead of process? Don't suppose there's anybody there who's mistaking being permanently busy for being genuinely effective for example?

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