How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

• ISBN13: 9780470539392
• Condition: New
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Praise for How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business

“I love this book. Douglas Hubbard helps us create a path to know the answer to almost any question in business, in science, or in life . . . Hubbard helps us by showing us that when we seek metrics to solve problems, we are really trying to know something better than we know it now. How to Measure Anything provides just the tools most of us need to measure anything better, to gain that insight, to make progress, and to succeed.”
-Peter Tippett, PhD, M.D.
Chief Technology Officer at CyberTrust
and inventor of the first antivirus software

“Doug Hubbard has provided an easy-to-read, demystifying explanation of how managers can inform themselves to make less risky, more profitable business decisions. We encourage our clients to try his powerful, practical techniques.”
-Peter Schay
EVP and COO of
The Advisory Council

“As a reader you soon realize that actually everything can be measured while learning how to measure only what matters. This book cuts through conventional clich?s and business rhetoric and offers practical steps to using measurements as a tool for better decision making. Hubbard bridges the gaps to make college statistics relevant and valuable for business decisions.”
-Ray Gilbert
EVP Lucent

“This book is remarkable in its range of measurement applications and its clarity of style. A must-read for every professional who has ever exclaimed, ‘Sure, that concept is important, but can we measure it?’”
-Dr. Jack Stenner
Cofounder and CEO of MetraMetrics, Inc.

Now updated with new research and even more intuitive explanations, a demystifying explanation of how managers can inform themselves to make less risky, more profitable business decisions

This insightful and eloquent book will show you how to measure those things in your own business that, until now, you may have considered “immeasurable,” including customer satisfaction, organizational flexibility, technology risk, and technology ROI.

• Adds even more intuitive explanations of powerful measurement methods and shows how they can be applied to areas such as risk management and customer satisfaction
• Continues to boldly assert that any perception of “immeasurability” is based on certain popular misconceptions about measurement and measurement methods
• Shows the common reasoning for calling something immeasurable, and sets out to correct those ideas
• Offers practical methods for measuring a variety of “intangibles”
• Adds recent research, especially in regards to methods that seem like measurement, but are in fact a kind of “placebo effect” for management – and explains how to tell effective methods from management mythology

Written by recognized expert Douglas Hubbard-creator of Applied Information Economics-How to Measure Anything, Second Edition illustrates how the author has used his approach across various industries and how any problem, no matter how difficult, ill defined, or uncertain can lend itself to measurement using proven methods.

How Everything Can Be Measured
Amazon-exclsuive content from author Douglas Hubbard

How can we measure the population of fish in a lake? And how is that like measuring unsatisfied customers who didn’t complain or measuring security breaches that were not detected? How can we isolate the effect advertising has on sales when a vast amount of unknowns also affect sales? How did an 11-year old girl use a simple measurement to debunk a popular practice in medicine? How did intelligence analysts in WWII estimate the monthly German tank production by an analysis of serial numbers of captured tanks? How do we measure quality, risk or innovation? How do we know what to measure in the first place? The answers are easier than you might think.

The idea that some things are utterly immeasurable is based on just three common misconceptions. As I explained in How to Measure Anything, the three misconceptions can be overcome and powerful measurement methods can be applied to resolve just about any problem. The misconceptions are Concept, Object and Method (you can remember them as .com). The concept of measurement refers to the meaning the word “measurement” is assumed to have. Some things are thought to be immeasurable only because it is believed that measurement must be some exact value. But the more pragmatic scientific approach to the term measurement is to treat it as quantified uncertainty reduction based on observation. If you have a wide range of possible values for the percentage of customers who would prefer a new product, all you really need is a reduction in that uncertainty to make a better bet about a new product.

The second misconception about measurement is the objective of measurement itself. If “strategic alignment”, or “employee empowerment” seem immeasurable, it is only because they are – initially – ambiguous. But if they are important to a business, then they must have observable consequences. They must have some impact on some decision (otherwise they wouldn’t need to be measured at all). And so they must be detectable in some manner, directly or indirectly.

The third misconception is about methods. Obscure but well-developed methods already exist for more types of measurement problems than most managers realize. Controlled experiments, variations on random sampling methods, and some very simple but non-obvious methods can be used in many practical business situations. While many measurements feel daunting at first, the fact is that we often have more data than we think, we need less data than we think, and getting more data through observation is simpler than we think. And, above all else, no matter how challenging a measurement problem appears, we should assume that we are not the first to measure something like it. Any measurement problem you encounter will very likely already have a practical solution. You only need to know about it.

Once these imaginary obstacles have been overcome, there are practical measurement solutions that can be applied to any uncertain decision. We can quantify any uncertainty and then compute the value of reducing that uncertainty by measurement. Where the value of information about a measurement is very high, my book explains how to employ sampling, controlled experiments, and even more methods in a way that makes it approachable for any manager.

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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

• good to great book, business and investing

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world’s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness — why some companies make the leap and others don’t.

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include:

• Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
• The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
• A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
• The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

“Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, “fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.”

Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Five years ago, Jim Collins asked the question, “Can a good company become a great company and if so, how?” In Good to Great Collins, the author of Built to Last, concludes that it is possible, but finds there are no silver bullets. Collins and his team of researchers began their quest by sorting through a list of 1,435 companies, looking for those that made substantial improvements in their performance over time. They finally settled on 11–including Fannie Mae, Gillette, Walgreens, and Wells Fargo–and discovered common traits that challenged many of the conventional notions of corporate success. Making the transition from good to great doesn’t require a high-profile CEO, the latest technology, innovative change management, or even a fine-tuned business strategy. At the heart of those rare and truly great companies was a corporate culture that rigorously found and promoted disciplined people to think and act in a disciplined manner. Peppered with dozens of stories and examples from the great and not so great, the book offers a well-reasoned road map to excellence that any organization would do well to consider. Like Built to Last, Good to Great is one of those books that managers and CEOs will be reading and rereading for years to come. –Harry C. Edwards

List Price: $ 29.99

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