How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

by Douglas W. Hubbard

First, even touchy-feely-sounding things like “employee empowerment,” “creativity,” or “strategic alignment” must have observable consequences

这里用了逆否命题来证伪

Second, Emily’s experiment demonstrated the effectiveness of simple methods routinely used in scientific inquiry,

Also, Emily showed that useful levels of experimentation can be understood by even a child on a small budget.

If the therapists can do what they claimed, then they must, Emily reasoned, at least be able to feel the energy field.

这里用了逆否命题来证伪

Fermi’s value to us is in how we determine our current state of knowledge about a thing as a precursor to further measurement.

three

quantitatively

reduction of uncertainty

not necessarily elimination,

Certainty about real-world quantities is usually beyond their reach.

The fact that some amount of error is unavoidable but can still be an improvement on prior knowledge is central to how experiments, surveys, and other scientific measurements are performed.

Real scientific

methods report numbers in ranges,

laid the foundation

measurement in general.

Current generations don’t entirely appreciate this, but his contributio...

A measurement doesn’t have to be about a quantity

The uncertainty,

quantified,

but the s...

might not be a quanti...

The commonplace notion that presumes measurements are exact quantities ignores the usefulness of simply reducing uncertainty, especially if eliminating uncertainty is not feasible (as is usually the case). And not all measurements even need to be about a conventional quantity.

we should incorporate both concepts.

First,

must be detectable in some way.

Second, if this thing is detectable, then it must be detectable in some amount.

For example,

Customer referrals

Clarification Chain

“ecological sustainability.”

another example

the more fundamental questions first: What does “sustainability” even mean, independent of whether it is related to ecological issues or not?

X were “more sustainable” than an alternative, then X must have some effect on future undesirable outcomes. To be more sustainable, X must reduce the magnitude of the event, reduce the probability of it, or defer it.

The Power of Small Samples: The Rule of Five

i have never thought of it ! so powerful!

that the sample is too small compared to the population size. There is sometimes a misconception that an informative sample should be a significant percentage of the entire population.

no measurement in biology or physics would

astronom...

most

“information value” at or near zero.

some var...

so...

what makes a measurement of high value is a lot of uncertainty combined with a high cost of being wrong.

If you are betting a lot of money on the outcome of a variable that has a lot of uncertainty, then even a marginal reduction in your uncertainty has a computable monetary value.

For ex...

moral high ground.

Ignorance is never better than knowledge.

how much time

they might say: “Yes, but people won’t remember exactly how much time they spend.”

customer pref...

“There is so much variance among our customers that you would ...

whether a particular initiative inc...

“But lots of factors affect sales. You’ll never know how much that in...