Metric Malfunction

How Misguided Measurements Derail Success

Of all the apocryphal stories to emerge from the ashes of the Vietnam War, few have had implications as far-reaching as the one included in Harry Summers’ book, American Strategy in Vietnam: A Critical Analysis.

“When the Nixon Administration took over in 1969, all the data on North Vietnam and the United States was fed into a Pentagon computer—population, gross national product, manufacturing capability, number of tanks, ships, and aircraft, size of the armed forces, and the like. The computer was then asked, ‘When will we win?’ It took only a moment to give the answer: ‘You won in 1964!’”

The story is unverified, but the sentiment is undeniably true.

The top brass in the Pentagon and the suits in the White House had a love affair with metrics during Vietnam. They thought numbers could neatly measure victory and defeat. But they didn’t. In the end, the numbers and the metrics marched them straight into one of the most humiliating chapters in modern history.

This same problem crops up all the time in the business of agricultural innovation.

It turns out that there are things that are important and things that we are prepared to measure, and they may not always be the same thing.