Quick story: I was the CFO for a company that sold to a private equity group (PEG). I took over as the CEO as the founders retired, leaving me to deal with the PEG. It quickly became apparent that the PEG managers looked at everything through the lens of an Excel spreadsheet. These guys were brilliant attorneys and analysts but lacked experience building businesses and managing teams. Ultimately, they couldn’t add mu…
I worked at a place with a lean 6 sigma certified specialist who towards the end of the companies doom effectively had the lead engineer cleaning out molding machines to track down every last tiny molded part that over the course of several years of continuous running had flung outside of its target. Same guy told me if the coke machine ever stole my change that he'd help me get it back from the vendor.
But “every customer counts” so other activities which are likely to result in more customers are put on hold to capture a single customer.
The problem in these cases is often that the management consultant doesn’t consider the resource limitations and opportunity costs of their decisions, particularly if they come from a much larger business. If you have only one lead engineer, then getting them to chase discarded parts (or, in my case, a single customer) makes no economic sense at all.
Quite often, the problem is not a focus on measurement per se, but rather the very human problem of focusing only on those metrics that support the analyst’s intuition.