Why did the current financial crisis occur? Among other things, we could point to greed, ethics, and policy creation. However, could we also consider commonplace business management systems and their metric-creation practices as a source for encouraging and amplifying these and other unhealthy behaviors?

Before answering this question, consider another aspect of the issue: Do you think that the cliché “Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave” describes a stimulus that could have contributed to the destructive behaviors that led to our economic problems of the day? I believe that many current business system metrics and resulting actions to achieve measurement goals did contribute to our current economic problems.

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