Management by numbers

Whoever said that ‘Whatever can be measured, will be managed’, was not lying. This principle can be seen in action everywhere you look inside all sorts of companies, as well as academia. Budgets are budgets and funding is funding, whether it’s coming from corporate profits or from a granting agency. Either way, someone is keeping track of the numbers.

That’s all fine – at least, until you get to the point of giving people grief about how many scintillation vials they’ve ordered or something. But that aside, the real damage in quantitative management comes as it gets applied to higher-level problems.