A key premise of metric fixation concerns the relationship between measurement and improvement. There is a dictum (wrongly) attributed to the great nineteenth-century physicist Lord Kelvin: “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.” In 1986 the American management guru, Tom Peters, embraced the motto, “What gets measured gets done,” which became a cornerstone belief of metrics.3 In time, some drew the conclusion that “anything that can be measured can be improved.”
