Whether software development or sales activities, success can only be measured within a specific context. If outcomes can’t be reduced to a number then results can be skewed by unexamined assumptions laced with occasional unconscious distortions.

Steven Johnson’s excellent book, The Ghost Map, describing a cholera outbreak in early Victorian London,  had a number of important points relating to official institutional behavior when presented facts not consistent with current beliefs. Probably the biggest was that the elites trump reality every time, either by changing the rules or ignoring the new reality. In this case, the result was a large loss of life and the establishment of epidemiology.

A variant of the Golden Rule, as in rules established by who has the gold, is the sales comp plan. Usually elaborately designed, often very think in small print, they too often are a study in perverse incentives resulting in unexpected consequences. Perhaps the most famous one in the last fifty years was what led Ross Perot to establish Electronic Data Systems after he filled his annual quota in mid-January, at which point his bosses wanted to change the comp plan.

Recently, Andy Brice of Oryx Digital Software And Consulting, wanted to get some accuracy in conversion rations for software offered on the internet. He designed a survey and invited independent software publishers to provide their numbers to a set of questions. It had the great advantage of putting some of the numbers in sharp focus, but with unaudited numbers anonymously submitted.

The measure of success for those working for someone else will always be made by that someone else. And regardless of how objective or impartial or elaborate the measuring process, the results will always be skewed in favor of that someone else.

Those who work for themselves, or whose income is strictly based on their own performance, the measure of success will always have many facets that are always changing. At least the numbers are easier to come by and far more difficult to fudge.

© Copyright 2009 Chuck Brooks for FutureWare SCG

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Tags: conversion ratios, institutional inertia, measuring success

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