[gtowey]

Although I agree with this, I can also think of a counter example by analogy.

If you're on a construction project and you, say, spend a bunch of time inspecting and maintaining the safety systems so that you prevent any accidents that seriously injure or kill someone, it's an all-too-common problem that management doesn't think you've done anything and doesn't reward the effort.

It's a huge failure of management that they don't seem to have any concept of benefits unless it can be quantified as ROI. And in the case where it truly is a life or death situation, I consider it a moral failure as well.

In fact, this scenario isn't even a stretch of the imagination. This is Boeing, right now.

[mrbombastic]

Yep, maybe i am destined to never make staff but I absolutely loathe that everything must be tied to some company wide target metric that moves in a quarter or it is invisible. Many things that are worthwhile and that companies absolutely should be doing are not easily measured on a quarterly timeline.

[dilyevsky]

This is commonly referred to as McNamara Fallacy