When metrics attack

By Zach Gemignani
April 5, 2006
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Sometimes success metrics can create unexpected, misguided, and counter-productive behaviors. I heard a great anecdote recently from a client, Celia. She is a former marketing head at an airline, so she knows of what she speaks:

The other week Celia was rushing to catch a United Airlines flight in Pittsburgh. She arrived late to the gate and found the United employees were intent on closing the door to the airplane ten minutes in advance of the flight. She had to argue to get herself on the flight. At United, it seems, success is measured by the percentage of flights that push-back from the gate before the scheduled time. These employees were perfectly willing to slam the door in Celia's face rather than face having to fill out paperwork and other repercussions tied to missing the success targets.

No doubt push-back time was considered something employees could control and reasonably correlated with on-time arrivals. In addition, push-back time is straightforward to measure -- unlike the seething anger of a customer like Celia.

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3 comments


April 5, 2006
Tony said:

A company my father worked for had metrics about "how fast calls were closed" and "how many calls were handled in a day" and "response time to priority 1 calls" and "amount of overtime" worked.

If a call needed to be closed within 4 hours, you would simply close out the call, request parts and ask the customer to re-open the case tomorrow. That helped several metrics.

If you needed to be "active" on a priority call, just call dispatch and have them mark you as active right away, even if you haven't finished what you are working on.

When there were overtime caps, just keep working afterhours but stop reporting it. When the stick for not meeting the metrics is big enough, the metrics take on a life of their own.


April 21, 2006
Mike said:

I can share a UA story related to this metric:
I leave from Denver to SFO and there are times when the UA team KNOWS they'll be stuck on the tarmack for a long time (record for me is 2 hours) before they'll be allowed to take off due to backups at SFO. . . that doesn't keep them from pulling back in time!


August 16, 2007
Janet said:

In a macroeconomics class focused on the soviet and post-soviet economies, the professor gave an example I've never forgotten: the centralized planners would send the factories a quota: if it was for 200 tons of lamps, the factories would make lamps and fill the bases with lead. 200,000 sweaters? baby sweaters it is!

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