A shock-wave went through the corporate world 25 years ago when a couple of bright young management consultants detailed organizational excellence in seven basic qualities.

In Search of Excellence… by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman became a world-wide best seller, a first and only for a book on management.

Peters and Waterman had significant scholarship behind them, coming from the Stanford business school, located in midst of what the world knows as Silicon Valley. They began with the premise that an excellent organization – company, charity, government – rises above the others by serving all its stakeholders – customers, shareholders, employees, civil society. What they attempted was a quantification of excellence.

What Peters and fellow McKinsey consultant Waterman learned from big organizations and small was success came more and more from knowing rather than simply making or doing. They wrote about customer satisfaction, nurturing the creative and managing by wandering around.

Management science – from the days of Edwards Deming – has long trained executives from two similar disciplines: engineering and finance. Peters and Waterman, both from engineering disciplines, foresaw the coming of knowledge organizations where solutions are found inside customers’ heads.

Media has always been in the knowledge trade, though not articulated until the dot com boom. Publishers viewed their success in the number of copies sold or amount of advertising sold. Broadcasters invented audience measurement to convert a quantifiable approximation of audience size into money from advertisers.

Statistical and survey methods perfected more than two generations ago founded the currency of media measurement still, mostly, in use today.

Product managers measure brand strength in many of the same terms Peters and Waterman used to quantify excellence.

In the two decades since Peters’ equally famous article “What gets measured, gets done”, managers have focused on the obvious: measure everything. Measure everything and we’ll figure out later whether or not it means anything. Companies like Oracle make fortunes facilitating the storage and manipulation of vast amounts of data. In the media business, nothing is more frightening than a junior media buyer with a PowerMac and version 12 of SPSS.

There is another side to this popular incitement to measurement: What we measure is what we do.

Holy Grails…hardly.

The long running discussion about passive media measurement provides a superb example of curing a problem by changing the patient.

Good read that rings true....