Companies have eliminated a lot of middle managers – the people with actual experience with the parts of the company that produce products and deal with people. So the C-level has resorted to standardized measurements to understand what’s going on. Measuring something isn’t the same as understanding it, however. To recapture understanding, we could reverse the trend of doing away with middle managers who are “in the weeds” about how the company operates. We could also remember that even though we have more access to data than ever, gathering and sharing it isn’t a cure-all. Essentially, we have to reject the belief that metrics are always objective and superior to human judgment. Back in 1986, management guru Tom Peters wrote, “What gets measured gets done,” which helped create the idea that quantifying things is the necessary first step to improving them. But when you focus only on metrics, you end up like Wells Fargo, which incurred millions of dollars in fines because some frontline employees decided they could meet their cross-selling quotas by signing customers up for new services without their knowledge.