Key Metrics

Can a Business Exist Without Metrics?

A business can exist without explicitly tracking key performance metrics, but it cannot be competently run, improved, or scaled. In practice, all functioning businesses rely on at least implicit metrics—such as cash sufficiency or customer presence—even if they are not formalized. Without explicit KPIs, a system cannot distinguish luck from competence, detect failure modes, transmit expertise, or self-correct. At civilization scale, metrics are not bureaucratic overhead but the interface between human intent and physical reality, enabling novices to outperform experts through expertise-embedded systems. A metric-free organization inevitably collapses into intuition-driven or personality-driven governance rather than reproducible, rigorous, open systems.

Source discussion: [1]