What Gets Measured, Survives. But What Gets Missed?

Working from London, I’ve noticed a subtle but telling difference in how corporate cultures operate, especially when compared to what I had grown used to in New York.

NYC is intensity, precision, velocity.

Everything is visible, tracked, and optimised. Visibility is currency, and performance is something you show, constantly. It’s fast-paced, energising, and execution-focused. But it also leaves little room for things that can’t be instantly quantified.

London works differently. There’s more space for ambiguity. More implicit trust. More willingness to let things unfold before assigning a metric. The outcomes are just as strong… but the path is quieter, more considered.

That contrast made something click for me.

I’ve spent most of my career in performance marketing — designing measurement frameworks, building scorecards, and proving value across media and markets. So I believe in measurement. Deeply.

But I also know its limits.

The danger is not in measuring too much, but in only valuing what we can measure. Because not everything that sustains a business fits into a dashboard.

We don’t always capture:
– The person who holds emotional weight in the team
– The manager who absorbs chaos so her team doesn’t burn out
– The colleague who helps shape a narrative behind the scenes
– The idea that didn’t “perform” on paper but sparked something better downstream

When these things go unnoticed, teams get busy but brittle. People learn to optimise for optics, not impact.

And slowly, we lose the parts of culture that actually make it work.

This isn’t an argument against performance. It’s a reminder that if we only reward what’s legible, we’ll build organisations where nothing intangible survives.

And sometimes, we lose something real. Simply because we were too busy measuring everything else.