Re: Why Penn CISO's Firing is Bad for All of Us

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Rich Kulawiec wrote:

> Let me share one other with you, one that I find quite useful almost
> every day:
>
>       The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured.
>       That is okay as far as it goes.  The second step is to disregard
>       that which can't be measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative
>       value.  This is artificial and misleading.  The third step is
>       to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't very
>       important.  This is blindness.  The fourth step is to say that
>       what can't be easily measured doesn't exist.  This is suicide.
>
>       --- social scientist Daniel Yankelovich describes the "McNamara
>       fallacy".  Quoted by Jay Harris, former publisher of the San Jose
>       Mercury News, in a speech explaining why he resigned his post.
>       [http://www.poynter.org/centerpiece/harris.htm]

That link seems to be dead, and the Wikipedia entry attributes his to 
"Charles Handy, The Empty Raincoat, page 219", despite most of the web 
apparently agreeing with your attribution to Yankelovich...

Anyway, that also seems like a circumlocution of another, better known, 
framing of the aphorism at the heart of this -- Einstein's:

   Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count;
   everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.



Regards,

Nick FitzGerald


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