Quality Quote: Manage What You Measure

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” is a quality quote often attributed to Peter Drucker, the Austrian-born American management consultant, educator and author.

Drucker may actually have been summarising a much earlier quote from William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (Lord Kelvin):
“When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. It may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely, in your thoughts, advanced to the stage of science.”

Either way, the premise is the same: without a clearly established metric for success, you cannot quantify progress and manage your process to produce the desired outcome. Without clearly defined quality objectives and a system to measure performance, you’re flying blind in a constant state of guessing.

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