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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I think this hypothesis is a good example of an opinion I’m developing that any average executive team can follow the spreadsheet. But what makes a team truly exceptional is the ability and wisdom to identify and act on the subjective and immeasurable qualities of the business.

If quality falls but sales rise, did quality not matter? Will it not matter? Maybe we’re not measuring the right things. Maybe we have the wrong models. Maybe there is no model and you just have a general intuition that this is probably important regardless.

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I actually think measurement is the source of “artificial stupidity”.

We tend to measure what’s readily quantifiable. But these tend to be the most basic facts of a situation. And when we make decisions solely based on those metrics, we ignore significant higher order effects — which are difficult to measure.

So we make reductive decisions.

Which is where humanity had previously evolved tribal knowledge, parables, etc — because generationally, we can learn those effects. But we threw all of that data out of our models, which are based purely on numerics.

However, the effect can be years to decades to manifest — much like modeling a farm as only basic inputs and outputs, then destroying the soil over years. (To reference another article today.)

It would be like trying to measure the GDP of the renaissance, then predict which artists to invest in.

> any average executive team can follow the spreadsheet. But what makes a team truly exceptional is the ability and wisdom to identify and act on the subjective and immeasurable qualities of the business.

This precisely. The spreadsheet explains your limitations, not your potential. No spreadsheet can truly predict demand. The best example is in marketing - you can give a marketing department $50 million to light on fire, or the right person in the right place at the right time can do the right thing and set word-of-mouth ablaze without spending a dime. Having a $50 million marketing budget doesn't allow you to control the outcome, it merely limits you to spending no more than $50 million in coming up with your own approach. It's not the same thing.

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