Lorin Hochstein 
Whenever the topic of OKRs comes up, I think about Drucker vs Deming. Not a particularly topical thing to write about, but I think it's evergreen.
https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/02/16/poor-deming-never-stood-a-chance/
Brian Marick@norootcause Nice essay. As something of a Drucker fan, I should note that he did later acknowledge that management-by-objectives didn’t work out that well. He had a lot of ideas. Some of them failed.
Steve Fenton ➜@marick @norootcause It's a theory that's hard in practice because you can do MBO without fundamentally changing the org culture. If you were telling people exactly what to do before MBO, you would manifest that through goal design. Most good ideas fail the subversion test.
@stevefenton @norootcause I like “Most good ideas fail the subversion test.”
I relate that to Poe’s “The Imp of the Perverse” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Imp_of_the_Perverse):
> The narrator describes this spirit as the agent that tempts a person to do things "merely because we feel we should *not*.”
I think of it when people propose ideas that are obviously sensible if only people behaved rationally.
@marick @norootcause I love that (and that's not in my little collection as it's obscure enough not to be on one of the compilations I own). This is very much "if managers just set them correctly / if workers didn't meet them through surprising methods" scenarios where you can't avoid being bitten on at least one side, and it's usually both.
@stevefenton @norootcause Interesting. I thought “The Imp of the Perverse” was one of the most anthologized of Poe’s stories. Maybe it’s fallen out of favor since I was ~20?
@marick @norootcause this is my old one (1950s) and I guess I'll need to go find a bigger collection! I love all of these. I love my Lovecraft, James, Jackson, and La Fanu collections, too. You can bask in their writing.
@stevefenton @norootcause Your pictures and list of authors reminds me of this Arthur Machen book I picked up, not realizing what was under the dust jacket. So cool.
@marick @norootcause that is EPIC!