every day
Watch out, McNamaras!
Sami Al Riyami
reyami@emaratalyoum.comsamialreyami
August 02 2021
The very creative and distinguished person, and one of the most famous people who provide useful and purposeful content on social media, Yasser Hareb, spoke through his account on “Snapchat”, about a very important topic, which is the dependence of many officials and agencies, and even individuals, in their personal capacity in their normal lives, On quantitative indicators alone, in evaluating a particular action, or decision, or even evaluating certain employees or people, quantitative indicators are the ones that depend on numbers as a unit of measurement, and through those numbers, the level of success and failure is determined, and based on that the decision is made.
Yasser Hareb gave McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961, during the reign of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, one of the people who were behind the decision to launch war on Vietnam, and relied on proving the success of American forces during the war on only one quantitative indicator , is the number of dead from the Vietnamese side, while ignoring all other indicators, and therefore the American army was bombing entire villages with their children, women and civilians, if it suspected that fighters from the Vietcong were present in them!
Robert McNamara failed in the war, and failed to choose the right indicators suitable for the situation in the field, and he was satisfied with his economic experience, being (he was) CEO of the "Ford" company, and he insisted on setting the death index as a single measure to evaluate the success of American forces in the war!
No one neglects the importance of having quantitative performance indicators, and no one denies the necessity of measuring them, to know the levels of success and failure, but the danger lies in the complete reliance on these quantitative or numerical indicators, without paying attention to any humanitarian or societal considerations, especially since these other considerations, which It may be far superior to quantitative indicators, they cannot be measured or equivalent in numbers, so evaluators usually prefer to choose numerical indicators, due to their ease of use and measurement, and therefore they ignore what cannot be measured easily, even if it is important, and since quantitative measures are usually limited Therefore, failure and inaccuracy often accompany reliance on these indicators!
What Yasser Hareb did not mention in his “Sanabat” is that Robert McNamara deeply regretted his decisions and strategy in the Vietnam War. It prevailed during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations: "We were wrong, and so wrong!"
Many of McNamara's critics assert that he failed to market his claims about noble intentions, as actual events proved that they were false allegations, so how can the intentions be noble, while the facts that confirmed the horrific results that resulted from those intentions are ignored?!
Therefore, everyone who follows McNamara’s approach, intentionally or unintentionally, should review his accounts, and set different, diverse and comprehensive performance indicators, and not rely only on numbers, because they may be misleading in many cases, and then it is also not useful to invoke noble intentions, Valenyat alone is not enough!
twitter@samialreyami
reyami@emaratalyoum.com
To read the previous articles of the writer please click on its name.
reyami@emaratalyoum.com