Dalai Lama Foundation Study Circle Montreal

June 12, 2012

a project of ServiceSpace

On Missions and Metrics

“There is an old Zen story about a man riding a horse, galloping frantically down a path. His friend, who is sitting by the side of the road, calls out ‘Where are you going?’ The man replies: ‘I don’t know. Ask the horse!’ When we build our tools, we often depend on metrics to guide our development. We keep graphs of unique visitors and pageviews and watch them closely. This keeps us honest. It’s hard to convince anybody that we’re building a useful tool if our metrics show that nobody is using it. But we must take care when we use metrics. Metrics can be like the horse in the old Zen story. Once we decide on them, they have a habit of setting the agenda. As the old adage goes, what gets measured gets managed.” MIT Media Lab Professor Sep Kamvar shares a thoughtful reflection on mission and measures. { read more }

Be The Change

Reflect on and question how you measure things in your own life, personal and professional.

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