The “spreadsheet mentality” sucks, and kills the efficacy of jobs
Metrics-driven organization (aka KPIs or what the author calls Spreadsheet mentality) is what I do for a living: I’ve seen companies die by it, and companies succeed thanks to it. It’s meant to do one thing: clarify everyone’s role in a large, confusing, often political organization where success wouldn't otherwise be clear. If that’s not a large, systemic issue that even the best would-be cult leader among your CxOs can’t address, you need to have KPIs for things to be clear (on top of the best would-be cult leader among your CxOs to sell the idea, the hard choices in there and the vision unpinning it).Imagine you work for the customers' support team: you unblock the client, the client is happy, and you also fix the public doc to unblock anyone after you… That’s all great. But at large organizations (namely: Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn) people ask: should we have a CS team at all? Isn’t that objective unscalable and trying to satisfy people a feature we shouldn’t have because every solution should be a product, not a process?Unless you are working at companies where that question is legitimate, you don’t need KPIs formalized into a tree structure: you need objectives, clear goals, praises for unexpected great work, and support to make sure that people who are asked to do things can. The MECE tree is useful if you don’t want to miss something. For smaller structures, the gaps are a feature: you can’t do it all.