"Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts."

- Sign hanging in Einstein's office at Princeton*

If Einstein knew this, why don't so many others who seem to believe that quantifying things give us the results we need when there are many elements that aren't easily quantifiable that tell us part of the picture.

To give just one example, can you really measure the dynamism of an organization based on its quarterly or even annual profit figures? Can it be dynamic without great results at the moment? Aren't results sometimes non-linear? And isn't this, perhaps, proof of a dynamic organization (i.e. if the results are linear, like the results of GE under Jack Welch's years, are proof that something's not quite right)?

Just wondering.


* hat tip, Tom Peters tweet

We like to think that every big leap in technology was the result of technical ingenuity. The following story from Steve Levy's new book on Google suggests some real "off-line" solutions can have big on-line improvements.

A legendary story at Google illustrated this principle. Around 2002, a team was testing a subset of search limited to products, called Froogle. But one problem was so glaring that the team wasn’t comfortable releasing Froogle: when the query “running shoes” was typed in, the top result was a garden gnome sculpture that happened to be wearing sneakers. Every day engineers would try to tweak the algorithm so that it would be able to distinguish between lawn art and footwear, but the gnome kept its top position. One day, seemingly miraculously, the gnome disappeared from the results. At a meeting, no one on the team claimed credit. Then an engineer arrived late, holding an elf with running shoes. He had bought the one-of-a kind product from the vendor, and since it was no longer for sale, it was no longer in the index. “The algorithm was now returning the right results,” says a Google engineer. “We didn’t cheat, we didn’t change anything, and we launched.”

Levy, Steven (2011). In The Plex (Kindle Locations 1255-1262). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.