Measurement and management

It seems the famous Deming quote about measurement and management reverses meaning when you include the rest of the sentence: "It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it – a costly myth." (The New Economics)

That's encouraging--the commonly quoted sub-phrase is pretty silly, and it seemed odd that somebody so smart would get it so wrong.

The most common enterprise in the world is families, which are almost invariably managed without statistical analyses. The parents may (should) keep track of the finances, but education and discipline and most of the rest are administered without recourse to spreadsheets.