Hitting The Target

Funny how some things never change. I was reading my journal from some fifteen years back on this date, and came across this reflection on the notion of assessing organisations (and, by extension, individuals) in a quantitative manner:

I veer between hope that it can be made to work usefully and despair at its lack of reality in demanding a quantitative approach to everything. There is something disturbing in the insistence on targets that surrounds us in so many aspects of modern organisations. I feel that a psychic cost has to be paid when we get the balance wrong - the balance, that is, between the usefulness of a highly specific aim to focus our efforts, like locating the treasure on a specific point of a map, and the need for room to just dance around in, meadows to roam.

Of course, we're still stuck wrestling with the same 'instruments' for assessment. But, then, some things do change. Fifteen years ago I was genuinely emotionally invested to some degree in these issues. These days I don't care in the slightest. 

(And another thing that hasn't changed. I just downloaded Supertramp's Breakfast in America from iTunes, an album I haven't listened to at full length since I was at university. Happy to say, it still hits the target in a big way.)