Measuring the wrong way for right reasons

Setting a goal is the right thing to do when establishing a business pursuit. We rightfully want to know, "Are we on track? Have we met our objective?"

It is as hard to determine how we'll measure success as it is to do the work that equals success.

That's why we so often use the wrong yardstick.

We measure clicks online to assess awareness. (Time spent with the content would be a more effective measure.)

Or we value the procurement of ideas by an arbitrary number of hours spent coming up with ideas.

Adam Davidson's cogent piece in The New York Times, "What's an Idea Worth?" offers more fuel to the argument: Valuing professional services (accounting, law, design, advertising) by the hour is inaccurate at best and a disservice to all involved. In a transparent, global economy, valuing ideas by the hour de-values ideas.

"Perhaps the biggest problem, though, was that billing by the hour incentivized long, boring projects rather than those that required specialized, valuable insight that couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be measured in time."

I wrote about "How to pay for ideas" a while back. What hasn't changed:

1.) An established, though ill-fitting, paradigm: Measuring the creation of ideas by the hour. Too many other financial, contractual and governance systems are predicated on this paradigm to make adopting a better system easier. We tacitly accept a broken model for valuing custom-fit, intellectual property. Until, of course, we don't accept it any longer.

2.) Lethargy towards change. It's simply easier to accept the current, wrong yardstick. This is the same pessimistic spirit which lead the record industry to first ignore then de-value file sharing. Who won there? Within the current system of measuring ideas by the hour, there's clearly a potential advantage for those who innovate and buck the establishment. Innovators will figure out how both parties emerge feeling they each got the better end of the deal.

But it starts with the root of the issue, rather than the route: What merits a successful outcome of two parties working together? Defining the potential value of an idea before someone comes up with the idea is the hard work worth pursuing.