Quant or qual?--KPIs require both.

• Author: Aronson, Donald E.

Before addressing the topic of KPIs, let me first introduce myself. I was a math major and a certified public accountant. Back in those days, my kind was affectionately referred to as "number-crunchers." In today's parlance, I would probably have been called a "quant."

So I should be an ideal candidate to address something as reliant on metrics as KPIs. But I have to confess that somewhere along the way I had an epiphany and became a full-fledged "qual." Too much exposure to poorly planned, poorly fielded and/or poorly interpreted market research was partly responsible for that conversion. That's not to say that I hadn't experienced excellent market research and benefited from its results. It's just that there had been a preponderance of the other with its inherent fudging of the facts or figures to reach what often appeared to be preconceived conclusions.

But all that's in the past. Now I'm just a schizophrenic agnostic who becomes a quant when it appears appropriate or a qual when it doesn't, and vice versa. One reason for this is the wealth of information so readily available to us now and how it's being used.

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For example, in the recent April 23 edition of The New York Times, Alina Tugend's article titled "In a Debt-Heavy Society, Being Defined by the Numbers" quoted the journalist Jonah Lehrer as saying, "Numbers make intangibles tangible. They give the illusion of control.... We want to quantify everything, to ground a decision in fact, instead of asking whether that variable matters." Lehrer concluded, "The obsession with numbers means we don't trust or even look for the intangibles that can't be measured, like wisdom, judgment and expertise." In an apparent contradiction, the very next day's issue of that same newspaper ran an article by Steve Lohr titled "When There's No Such Thing as Too Much Information." Lohr referred to as-yet unpublished research, which concludes that "companies that rely heavily on data analysis are likely to outperform others ... and [this] has huge implications for competitiveness and growth."

Qual v. Quant

Where, then, does that leave me with regard to KPIs--and why? For the past 16 years, my firm has devoted a substantial part of its time to a form of market research--specifically, client feedback interviews. Therefore, most of what we uncover and pass on to the law firms and other professional services firms we represent are findings and recommendations based on the primarily...