from Hacker News

The Only Two Business Metrics That Matter

by njl on 4/14/11, 12:19 AM with 1 comments

• by jacques_chester on 4/14/11, 1:14 AM

  "Income per Employee" is a problematic metric for comparison because the confounding variables are so large (it may be useful for internal purposes). For smaller firms simple variance will dominate the rankings. Larger firms can't be compared either -- different market sectors will show different figures. Some industries are labour-intensive and that's that. Software is not one of these.

  And "employee happiness" isn't a metric at all. What's the unit of measurement? What's the instrument that makes the measurement? It's not as though we can perform daily fMRIs. It's an important soft factor to keep an eye on, but it's hardly a set of numbers that can be put on a cool dashboard.