At Harvard, an ancient inscription and a modern management question reveal the limits of what business chooses to measure.
In 2025, I attended the Work and Flourishing Summit at Harvard, where our firm served as a sponsoring partner. At some point, someone handed me a microphone, a generous gesture and, if you have ever heard me follow an idea beyond its allotted time, a small act of institutional courage.
I had come to ask a question of the chief executives gathered there:
Is there one question that could change how we lead?
I did not have to invent it. Harvard had already carved it in stone.
The Question Above the Door
Across from where we gathered stands Emerson Hall, home to Harvard’s Department of Philosophy. Above its entrance are the words of Psalm 8:
What is man that Thou art mindful of him?
It is a strange thing for a university to place above a door. Not an answer. Not a declaration. A question.
Universities can revise curricula, renovate rooms, rename centers, and reorganize departments. Stone is less cooperative. It waits. Generations pass beneath it carrying books, ambitions, unfinished arguments, and private griefs. The question remains where it was, asking each of them what a human being is and why one should command our attention.
Harvard helped transform psychology from a branch of philosophy into an experimental science. William James, the American philosopher and psychologist who helped establish the field at Harvard, studied consciousness without reducing it to machinery. He understood that a human life is experienced from the inside, as a rushing and irregular stream of memory, sensation, desire, fear, and meaning.
The inscription above Emerson Hall asks us to look at the whole mysterious creature.
Modern organizations rarely have that luxury. They must hire, evaluate, promote, reward, and sometimes dismiss. They need evidence. They need categories. They need numbers.
But there is a danger here.
What begins as a tool for understanding a person can quietly become a substitute for seeing one.
Harvard’s Other Question
Decades later, another Harvard thinker posed a question about measurement.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard Business School professor renowned for developing the theory of disruptive innovation, spent much of his career explaining why successful companies fail. Then he turned the instruments of strategy toward something more intimate:
How will you measure your life?
Christensen understood that human beings allocate their lives much as organizations allocate capital. We invest attention, time, affection, and ability. We say that relationships matter, but our calendars reveal where the resources went. We claim that integrity is nonnegotiable, then discover that compromise rarely arrives demanding everything at once. It asks for something tiny, reasonable, almost beneath notice.
Then it returns.
His question unsettles us because it removes the usual refuge of good intentions. It asks what our choices are producing.
The question carved into Emerson Hall asks why human beings deserve our attention.
Christensen asks whether the way we spend our lives proves that they have received it.
One question comes from an ancient psalm. The other comes from a business school. Both refuse to let success define itself.
What the Numbers Cannot See
I am not an opponent of measurement. I design assessments, performance systems, and frameworks intended to help leaders and organizations understand themselves more clearly. I believe in disciplined evidence. Numbers can correct vanity, expose waste, reveal inequality, and rescue us from the stories we tell ourselves when reality has become inconvenient.
But numbers are disciplined witnesses. They become dangerous when promoted to judges.
The spreadsheet does not lie. It can, however, tell an impeccably accurate fragment of the truth.
An organization can measure productivity without noticing exhaustion. It can measure retention without asking whether people have become too afraid to leave. It can measure engagement while employees carefully learn which answers are safe. It can count ideas while punishing the person who questions the assumptions beneath them.
The figures may be correct.
The picture may still be false.
This is the peculiar danger of quantification. What we can count begins to appear more real than what we cannot. Revenue looks solid. Trust looks sentimental. Output fits neatly into a cell. Courage does not. Eventually, we begin managing the measurable and treating everything else as atmosphere.
Yet atmosphere is precisely what people breathe.
What Harvard’s Research Adds
Harvard’s own scholarship gives this argument practical weight.
Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School scholar known for her research on creativity and work, found that a sense of progress in meaningful work is among the most powerful forces shaping motivation, satisfaction, and creativity. People do not merely want to be busy. They want to know that their effort is going somewhere worth reaching.
Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor whose research transformed how organizations understand teams, demonstrated the importance of psychological safety. People learn and contribute more effectively when they can raise questions, admit mistakes, and express concerns without fearing humiliation or punishment.
Christensen asks where a life is headed. Amabile asks whether work feels meaningful. Edmondson asks whether truth can be spoken along the way.
Together, their work suggests that a serious view of performance must look beyond output. It must ask whether people can see meaning in their work, exercise judgment within it, and tell the truth about it.
These are not decorative concerns to be considered once the real business is finished.
They are part of the real business.
When Measures Begin to Manage Us
The familiar saying is that what gets measured gets managed. The more disturbing possibility is that what gets measured eventually begins to manage us.
A metric directs attention. Attention shapes behavior. Repeated behavior becomes habit. Habit forms character. Before long, an apparently neutral dashboard has acquired a moral philosophy.
Every measurement system whispers an answer to the question, What matters here?
If the organization measures speed but ignores judgment, people learn to hurry.
If it measures achievement but ignores conduct, people learn that results can purchase absolution.
If it measures agreement but ignores candor, people learn to perform loyalty while reserving the truth for private conversations.
The most consequential losses rarely appear as red cells on a dashboard. They arrive as smaller voices, safer ideas, postponed courage, and the gradual disappearance of the person who once cared enough to object.
Nothing appears to have broken.
That is what makes the damage so easy to tolerate.
A Question Worth Carrying
Standing before Emerson Hall, I found myself thinking about the audacity of carving a question into stone. Harvard could have chosen a maxim announcing what it knew. Instead, the building asks everyone who enters to remember what they do not yet understand.
Perhaps leadership should begin there.
Not with the fantasy that people can never be measured. They can, and sometimes they must be. But every measure should be held with enough humility to admit what it cannot see.
Christensen asked how we will measure our lives. The stone asks us to remember whose lives we are measuring.
Those questions belong together.
The first asks whether we have chosen the right measures.
The second asks whether we have remembered the person behind them.
Before opening the next dashboard, approving the next performance system, or deciding what success will mean, I believe every leader should ask:
What does this measure help us see?
What might it teach people to hide?
If every target were reached, would we be proud of the people and the institution we had become?
The question is not whether we will measure. We will.
The question is whether our measurements help us see people more clearly, or slowly teach us to stop seeing them at all.
Bibliography
Amabile, Teresa M., and Steven J. Kramer. The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work. Harvard Business Review Press, 2011.
Explore the research behind the progress principle
Christensen, Clayton M. “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Harvard Business Review, July and August 2010.
Read the original Harvard Business Review essay
Christensen, Clayton M., James Allworth, and Karen Dillon. How Will You Measure Your Life? Harper Business, 2012.
Explore the book and its central argument
Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2018.
Explore Edmondson’s research on psychological safety
Harvard University Department of Psychology. “William James.” Harvard University.
Read about William James and the emergence of psychology at Harvard
The Holy Bible. Psalm 8:4, King James Version.
Read Psalm 8