Body count as KPI

Robert McNamara ran the Pentagon during the Vietnam war. He was a numbers guy and needed a way to measure success. So he picked … body count. Dead enemies going up meant the war was going well; never mind morale, support from local populations, or anything that made sense. If it didn’t fit on the spreadsheet, it didn’t count.

Today that concept has a name: The McNamara Fallacy. Measure the easy stuff, ignore the stuff that’s hard to measure.

Marketing attribution is the same thing in a different suit. For example: last-click attribution gives credit for a sale to whatever the last ad or link the customer clicked before buying. Because that’s the easy thing to count.

The blog post that planted the idea, the friend’s recommendation, your name popping up multiple times somewhere before they searched for it… All of them were ignored for being untraceable.

So, a conversion number that looks rigorous is often McNamara’s body count with an interface refresh.

Watch out for this one. Measuring beats not measuring, but metrics like these are a slice of the picture, not the whole picture. The stuff that’s hard to measure, like whether a customer will still love you in five years, is what often decides if you survive.

I see way too many people worshiping the numbers, not the thing itself.

Colin