MBO ignores processes

Deming in point 11b of his 14 Points for Management directly opposes Drucker who first popularized Management by objectives in his book The Practice of Management

Apparently Drucker recognized the failings of MBO 15 years later but it still continues to be the dominant mode of operations. OKRS come to mind. They might help with alignment (OKRs aid Einheit) but aren’t best for making progress. Systems over goals.

Deming sees MBO as “an attempt to manage without knowledge of what to do.” The managers focus on outcomes without looking into the processes that produce them. They end up gaming metrics rather than improving  processes. Managing by numbers risks conflating fluctuations and outliers, and fluctuations should never be the basis for management decisions. Refer to his Funnel Experiment and Red Bead Experiment for more on this.

In data science projects, this sort of arbitrariness often takes the form of an OKR for things like model performance which are unpredictable a priori.

References: https://michelbaudin.com/2012/08/26/metrics-in-lean-deming-versus-drucker/