It appears that imitation has become more important than making money. If you don't think this is true go to the typical development team and ask the team members to independently estimate the cost to shareholders of delaying their product introduction by three months. The answers will differ by at least an order of magnitude. This means that they are making vital decisions that affect the schedule and economics of the project while they are clueless about the economic consequences. And, even more seriously, it has not even occurred to their management that this might be a problem.
Many people seem hell-bent on looking to metrics for salvation.
Yet it's possible to measure your way into extinction. I maintain that the sole purpose of control, and its companion, measurement, is to influence economic outcomes. We need to choose metrics based on the underlying economics of the process, which means different processes need to measure different things. I know a VP of Engineering who complained to me that his company let him make component decisions that cost millions of dollars a year with no oversight, but required him to get approval of his boss to remove a box of pencils from the storeroom. A great example of focusing control effort on a parameter that has trivial economic impact.