The World of One Dimensional Performance Measures

I think the topic needs a little bit of explanation. I feel most of us tend to rate people based on a single character attribute- students based on grade/CG, professional based on salaries, neighbors based on "acres of land",friendship based on favors done and so on and so forth. You can pick any profession and you will find that there's one dominating characteristic that draws all the attention. This is a good way of assessment and makes the life of the analyser a lot more easier. Since not every one is an expert in every field so it becomes handy to have a single performance measure, so that people from unrelated fields can easily build their rankings. A perfect example can be GDP growth rate being taken as a proxy for a nation's economic development. So it becomes easy for general people to gauge performance of nations without going into the depth of economics. But then a healthy GDP growth does not always translate into healthy economic development. There may be cases when the economy grows only on account of rich getting richer and poor not touched at all and hence economic disparity increasing. And economists have created indices to capture all of this, but then it becomes hard for non-economists to understand these indices.

But then what is the problem?

The problem is this-People (generally) try to extrapolate that one characteristic into other dimensions (attributes) and try to create a holistic picture out of single characteristic."

So you can see what is the problem. People try to draw the complete charactristic profile of an individual based merely on a single charactersitic. Examples are numerous-

-Kids being characterised as bright and dull on the basis of a single number- "percentage" (does TAARE ZAMEEN PAR rings a bell?)

-Professionals on the basis of "salary" earned and "growth" (in salary) achieved;

Although it is very essential to meaure performance and these single characteristics are very handy to take decisions; but those decisions should be taken and that's where it should end rather then extrapolating that single measure into other attributes and charateristics.

I believe there are "as many number of attributes/qualities as there are people in the world" and hence everyone has that one dimension of superiority over others; or in short everyone is special. But the hard fact is life has been modeled around just a few attributes; and mostly people try to move on those lines without trying to convince themselves of their inherent attribute. This herd mentality does not get properly scrutinized till the time it becomes extremely essential; when the question is slammed across the face (for instance 1-Why MBA?, 2-Why this job?...the only ones which I can think of and relate to at this point of time)

And this herd mentality gets ingrained even before we start to think about ourselves. The Kids are virtually forced to attend coaching classes to get into the elite engg. colleges and they get into some branch of engg. based on their rank. [mostly] It is never asked as to what a kid's aspirations are and never do parents try to find out what's the "core competency" of their child is. Kids get into engg. college, find out everything being taught is useless, try to find out more fruitful avenues. Some find MBA much brighter (moneyer) than engg. and start preparing for MBA entrances even in 2nd year of their engg.; before they even get to know what their stream of engg. is all about. To a great extent the fault lies with the (false) branding being done by most of the top MBA colleges. And then this mentality drives most of the MBAites to streams with wealthier job avenues.

So what is the solution?

Its simple! make friends on the basis of friendship attributes (not because someone is a rank-1, hey! but that does not mean leaving out the rank-1 compulsorily); rate people on the basis of the interaction that you have (rather than what their bank balance suggests!).....

As always there was more of problem searching and less of solutions; but then its more important to identify the problem. Everyone is wise enough to find the solutions, or should I say solutions are better left for individuals to be found as those are to be implemented by themselves.