It’s easy to do arithmetic. It is difficult to link numbers to meaning.

Heaven help the bean counter who knows nothing about beans.

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Often hyper-analytical folks use the formal mechanics of thought as a red herring to distract attention away from the poverty of their thinking, or to overwhelm or dazzle or intimidate anyone tempted to question their conclusions. They’ll present their arithmetical correctness, logical facility, copious metrics as representative of the whole, when if fact the whole is assembled piecemeal, with many exclusions and omissions at just the critical points where the strongest links are needed.

Look closer: how do all these numbers and models and arguments link up with lived reality? Often what you will find is a facile reductionism: what is treated as relevant is limited to what can be effortlessly measured.

Quantification is necessary, but it is not sufficient. We must know what to measure and how to measure it. This means rooting quantities in qualities.

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The mania for quantifiability can lead some “hard-bitten realists” to exclude precisely the aspects of reality most crucial to their success.

Consider this: Isn’t the “soft” and “squishy” aspects of business in fact the true substance of economy? Isn’t every dollar a quantum of desire? Not that we can run businesses without mathematical rigor, it’s just rigor, while indisputably necessary, is not sufficient for running a successful business.

And education was, until very recently, seen as the cultivation of human beings, of citizens capable of political responsibility — not about ability to perform particular tasks (i.e. training). Not that skills-training is dispensable — training is necessary in education, but not sufficient.

But perversely, often in the name of realism, the very reality — the cornerstone — of these pursuits is rejected. As if we have to choose between formal, objective rigor or qualitative judgment, but can’t have both!

And romantics unwittingly play into the either-or antithesis, and compensate for excessive quantitativeness with rejection of quantification. The conflict is not one versus the other, but one-versus-other versus both together in meaningful relation.

Quantity and quality understood together as a related whole — that is what is needed. But this is exceedingly difficult. It requires a well-constructed team, and real leadership.

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The tendency toward quantitative reductionism is destroying business and education.

A particularly ludicrous example: To assess writing proficiency, elementary school students are asked to write an essay on some topic. The essays are scored by counting the number of words. The ones who write the most words are the most proficient. I am not kidding.

The logic is this: who is to decide what is and is not “good” writing? At least we can all agree on a word count. Never mind that absolutely nobody can really agree that verbosity equals good writing. That kind of question is too rarely asked.

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Very few individuals can cover by themselves the full range of quantitative and qualitative factors relevant to the life of an organization.

This is why it is so important for people with very different sensibilities to be able to converse and share and complement one another. The desire of leaders to encompass within their own minds the entirety of an organization’s intellectual scope leads to organizational mediocrity. In a sense a leader who is humble will be greater than the leader who exalts himself as intellectually superior to his organization. A mediocre leader only knows how to lead the like-minded. An inferior leader reduces everyone to his own limited terms.

Every organization needs to acquire the core capability of authentic dialogue.

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(That opening remark “heaven help” is a Chinese allusion.)