"If you can't measure it, you can't manage it" is a comforting mantra. Switch it round and we have a recipe for perfect management: get the right measurement tools and you can manage anything.
Hence the power wielded by accountants. The measures they devise give corporate reports credibility and managers the illusion of control - and their authors delusions of grandeur.
It has always been thus. The head of the treasury of Upper Egypt during the Old Kingdom took the title "governor of all that exists and all that does not exist". For those who believe measurement is at the heart of good management, little has changed since then.
But even accountants harbour a suspicion that too much of what matters in business escapes our attention, in spite of sophisticated methodologies. Businesses always seem too complicated to be reduced to the easily measurable.
Take the famous balanced scorecard methodology. Its authors claim it is "a management system that can channel the energies, abilities and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organisation".
A mechanism for tying everything from an individual's performance mechanisms to top-level corporate strategy into an integrated system, the balanced scorecard tries to capture everything that matters in an overarching framework.
The truth can be very different, of course. Many have found themselves drowning in paperwork and methodology in an attempt to realise links between the elements of the system. Others have struggled to achieve the balance required.
It is easy to poke fun at such frameworks. The real problem lies in the prevailing management mentality - certainly where boardrooms continue to be dominated by accountants, and in which retiring chief executives look only too naturally to their finance directors as potential successors.
Accountants are trained to focus on the structured and measurable, but as business moves from the factory line and closer to the fabled knowledge economy, it necessarily moves from the mechanical, logical and measurable towards the most unpredictable, irrational and hard-to-measure element of all: the human being.
Accountants ambitious to exert real influence over the boardrooms of the next decade must recognise that the irrational can be managed effectively. Management teams that do this well already identify these difficult to measure but important characteristics of the business and its proposition.
Personality traits of key business leaders do not have to be lost as the organisation gets more sophisticated. They can be converted into elements of the brand, and managed.
Qualities of the successful organisation of last year, which employees are reluctant to lose in the rush for scale and efficiency in the new economy, can be isolated and analysed via effective staff surveys and then converted into organisational values - and then made to live in the organisation and used to test management initiatives.
Logical reductionism of the management by measurement school can lead accountants into some disastrous blind alleys.
The first step down the alley, as Charles Handy has observed, is to measure whatever can be easily measured.
The second step is to disregard what cannot be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what cannot be measured is not really important. This is blindness.
And the fourth step is to say that what cannot be measured does not exist.
Accountants wanting to succeed need to manage by imagination as well as, if not more than, by measurement.
Rupert Merson is a partner at BDO Stoy Hayward.
