[freefaler]

When you need to do a job and have a certain amount of resources available you need to measure the productivity of your process. If you don't do that you'll waste your resources.

In business this means that if you have a machine that produces X widgets per hours and costs Y dollars to run, you can estimate is it worth running it at all or it's not economical to do that.

With teams of people managers/owners solve the same problem - I have a fixed amount of resources and need to allocate them properly. No measure = no good allocation = going out of business.

The reason capitalism creates more and cheaper goods that socialism is that resource allocation problem is solved by every participant in the free market (or mostly free market). Without measurement, the owners can't allocate the resources properly and they'd go out of business.

If you have worked in a team with badly performing members who don't pull their share of the load this creates imbalances in the team and the best performing members of the team leave, because they don't want to deal with the laggards.