Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

by Clayton M. Christensen

Measuring What Matters “What gets measured, gets done.” It’s generally used in the positive sense of urging managers to measure for benchmarking efficiency and improvements. But the data we use to measure efficiency is double-edged. Yes, it enables measurement and management, but data also creates a model of the external world. Managers inside a corporation—especially large ones—rarely know their customers directly. They know the customer only through data—the models and spreadsheets that slice, dice, and reconstruct real people into “segments” of similarly attributed phenomena. When companies organize themselves into business units with responsibilities for products of certain characteristics or units with responsibilities for certain customer groups, data is gathered through those filters creating models that rarely map to customer jobs. “Turns out in the modern world, there’s so much you can easily measure: screens, traffic, conversion rates, frequency, screens per use. . . . There were so many things to measure that our people got full of measuring all the stuff that was easy to measure because it rolled off our servers,” says Intuit founder Scott Cook. But in spite of the volume of data that Intuit had on every click its customers made, something fundamental was missing. “We weren’t measuring what was most important to our customers. Because it’s hard to measure. But it matters profoundly. We were not measuring whether we were improving customers’ lives.” “Improving c...