Volume 194: Leadership Over Measureship.
Leadership Over Measureship.
tl;dr: How to beat the status quo.
If you’ve ever stood in line at the supermarket waiting forever because only one in twenty checkout lines is working…If you’ve ever been asked to hit a smiley face button in the public restroom after taking a pee…If you’ve ever had to click away a million buttons and pop-ups asking for your email address on a single website…If you’ve ever watched Uber double its price in real-time…If you’ve ever had an app randomly interrupt your day to ask if you love it…If you’ve ever had a bossware-infected laptop demand you click your keyboard to prove you are working…Congratulations. You’ve experienced “measureship,” the management philosophy du jour that’s replacing leadership across the economy.
Before going into more detail on what measureship means and how to compete and win against it, it's worth stepping back to understand how we got here. As with many shifts in business, measureship wasn't driven by a single force but by a convergence of factors, which in combination amplify its concussive force:
Across capitalism's arc of history, we can broadly divide it into periods of efficiency and periods of innovation. Today, we’re in a period of efficiency brought about by the end of ZIRP-era economics.
Technology and digitization have massively increased the surface area of what can be measured, which has massively increased the irrelevance of what is being measured.
Technocratic, quantitative leadership is becoming the norm as everyone copies tech. Financialization also handed finance responsibility for the levers of value creation, which it now manages through a lens of efficiency rather than growth.
The flattening of hierarchies removed the middle management training grounds for leaders, who are increasingly unprepared to lead, so they default to metrics management instead.
The rise of data as a management tool has been accompanied by the rise of data as a dependency. Specifically, that data drives decision-making rather than informs it and that data provides the answers rather than helping us ask better questions.
The result is a brutalist business philosophy defined by its relentless optimization of the status quo for the corporation's good at the expense of the customer.
It also demonstrates all the hallmarks of exploitable competitive weakness, riddled as it is with predictable and observable problems:
Anti-human.
Measureship-driven corporations become increasingly anti-human as qualitative signals are deprecated and quantifiable efficiency and management-by-dashboard take over, often at the expense of basic common sense.Directionless.
Lacking a forward-looking radar, measureship-driven corporations become confused and directionless over time. When you reflexively measure everything, what matters is rapidly buried beneath a morass of complexity, measurement theater, and bureaucracy.No New Ideas.
Measureship-driven corporations struggle to innovate beyond the pursuit of incremental gains because backward-looking data must first evidence every forward-looking decision, eliminating entire categories of idea, imagination, experimentation, and innovation in the process.Lazily Value Extractive.
Incrementalism and a lack of new ideas mean measureship-driven corporations are forced to pursue value-extractive tactics to grow because they lack the philosophical capacity, business systems, and imagination to do the hard work of value creation.
Ultimately, however, there is a price that gets paid for pointing the entirety of the energy of the corporation toward the quantification of incremental efficiency gains and opportunistic value extraction, and this is that unless you have monopolistic advantages, performance first slips, and then declines precipitously, as customers begin routing around and rejecting increasingly terrible experiences, weak value propositions, and “enshittified” brands. The opportunity for competitors, then, is to accelerate this collapse to their own benefit by offering a radically better alternative.
The good news is that because measureship has such obvious blindspots, there’s plenty of competitive weakness to aim at. In other words, the characteristics of measureship are easily identifiable, and the problems it causes are fairly predictable, which means we can formulate competitive strategies designed specifically to exploit these weaknesses. While specific strategies will be context-dependent, the real value-unlock comes when we first shift our management philosophy - or lens through which we think - from one of incremental measureship to one of directed leadership:
Have Empathy & Be Relentlessly Pro-Human
Where measureship believes that organizations should be led via quantitative dashboards, leadership rolls up its sleeves and focuses first on the human experience – for customers and employees. By starting from the principle of creating value for the people we serve rather than extracting it for ourselves, we can focus much more intently on innovation and the few metrics that matter rather than the many that do not.Elevate Qualitative Signals
Where measureship-driven corporations deprecate qualitative signals and ignore the obvious silo problems their method creates, the leadership-driven alternative elevates qualitative signals to help establish a more integrated competitive advantage. Qualitative signals provide an essential balance to the quantitative, together providing a superior understanding of the customer, their needs, wants, and desires.Create Narrative Driven Strategies
Human beings respond to story, narrative, and metaphor. To beat competitors stuck optimizing for the status quo, we must articulate strategies via a set of clear and compelling narratives that excite our people to change the status quo rather than optimize it. Where measurement-driven corporations manage via low-context incremental numerical uplift, leadership-driven alternatives lead via high-context, inspiring stories of the future we intend to create.Use Minimum Viable Metrics
While the measureship-driven organization wastes time, energy, and resources on the distracting and irrelevent measurement of everything, smart alternatives start from the position of MVM “Minimum Viable Metrics.” The idea being to identify the few measures that really matter so the organization can focus most of its energy and resources on creating value and a lot less on measuring & extracting it.Lead Through New Ideas.
Because measureship struggles to innovate and has little capacity for new ideas, the leadership alternative is to lead through forward motion. When you are the one bringing new ideas to the table, you force measureship competitors to play catchup. Keep doing this, and they’ll never catch up because you’ve forced them into a permanent game of ‘behind the 8-Ball.’
While measureship has become such a concussive force that we may be forgiven for thinking it has no alternative, there are few good reasons for measureship to remain a dominant management philosophy beyond the obvious short-term efficiency gains it purports to create. If we zoom out and look at long-run patterns, returns to efficiency tend to start high, and then begin a steady slide toward diminishing returns before eventually flipping toward value destruction. With brand failures like Nike and Starbucks combined with our everyday experiences as our canaries in the coal mine, the time feels right for us to start swinging back toward the Next Cycle of innovation.
To finish, with all the clamor around Generative AI, measureship seeks to squeeze it into the box of status quo optimization, figuratively illustrated by the mental picture of GenAI creating thought leadership reports that a different GenAI summarizes because it’s too boring for people to read.
With that as our competition, the obvious opportunity is to point this new technology at the new, the different, and the radically better and to leave the status quo they’re so focused on optimizing - and the measureship management philosophy that demands it - behind.