As general manager of the Philadelphia 76ers, Sam Hinkie traded away the team’s most valuable players for high picks in the NBA draft, and the team lost in the meantime. The plan became known as the Process, and “Trust the Process” became the fans’ slogan. In the 2015–16 season the 76ers won 10 games and lost 72.
After a 1–21 start that season, the team brought in Jerry Colangelo as chairman of basketball operations. Hinkie stepped down on April 6, 2016, before the team had a winning season.
John Doerr learned objectives and key results, or OKRs, as an engineer at Intel under Andy Grove in the 1970s. In the fall of 1999 he introduced them to the founders of Google, a start-up he had just funded. His book on the method, Measure What Matters, was published in 2018. OKRs are typically set for a quarter and reviewed often.
When the federal government buys goods and services, the Federal Acquisition Regulation requires that past performance “shall be evaluated in all source selections” for negotiated competitive acquisitions above a set threshold, unless the contracting officer documents why it is not appropriate. A contractor’s record on earlier contracts becomes part of the score.
A newcomer is treated neutrally. In the case of an offeror without a record of relevant past performance, the offeror “may not be evaluated favorably or unfavorably on past performance.”
US Army doctrine, ADP 6-0, defines it as action in the absence of orders, when existing orders no longer fit the situation, or when unforeseen opportunities or threats arise. Mission orders are defined as directives that emphasize to subordinates the results to be attained, not how they are to achieve them.
The Army writes into doctrine a duty to act when nobody has told you to.
American sports put the current result in the largest object in the building, visible from every seat, updated continuously. Nobody argues with it, and there is no separate record of who played better.
The Oakland Athletics, working with one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, used statistical analysis to identify undervalued players and won more games than teams spending several times as much.
The scouts hated it. The methods were unorthodox, the reasoning was unfamiliar, and it produced wins — which ended the argument.
A number carried to three decimal places, quoted from memory by ordinary fans, and applied outside baseball to anything from hiring to sales calls. The unit of judgment is what actually happened, divided by how many times you tried.
From Jerry Maguire, 1996, and shouted rather than spoken. It entered American business speech immediately, because it names the moment when talk is required to convert into something countable.
The line is usually credited to Vince Lombardi, though it was first said by UCLA coach Red Sanders. Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.
It is the more absolute version of an earlier, softer sentence, and it is the absolute version that stuck.
The sentence is quoted constantly in American management and commonly attributed to Peter Drucker, though the attribution is disputed. Whatever its origin, the assumption inside it is that a thing without a number attached to it will drift.