Measures of Success

Don't confuse fame with success. —Erma Bombeck

To help get The Measurement Standard off to a good start, we asked friends and colleagues for their own personal measures of success. What follows is a list of some of the more interesting. (If you'd like to share your own measures of success with our readers, please write to us. Those we print will earn their authors a KDPaine & Partners' History Of The World folding ruler!)

Robert D. Putnam—author of Bowling Alone and Malkin Professor of Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (read more about him)—writes that:

"A good measure of success in a community is how many neighbors' names you know. As the years go by, however, I increasingly recognize that this measure is age-specific."

Colonel Tomas J. Begines, the Public Information Officer for the NATO-led multinational Stabilization Force in Bosnia, gave us one of our favorites: "No resumption of hostilities." It was his job to ensure that the media, the military and their Bosnian counterparts were all communicating sufficiently to ensure that the conflict did not resume. Makes counting clips look a bit trivial, doesn't it?

Another friend who works for the World Bank in Islamabad, Pakistan said simply, "Getting my team out alive." If she shuts down a program because of corruption or misuse of funds, chances are good that she and her team will be on the wrong side of a power struggle, and perhaps on the receiving end of violence. So far, thank God, she's been successful.

A more prosaic situation, one that will be familiar to many readers, comes to us from the decidedly non-prosaic D.J. Hattaway, who became Tom Daschle's Press Secretary on September 10th(!), and who was the press spokesperson for the Gore campaign:

"My business manager says I'm supposed to measure my success by the extent to which we meet the revenue goals in the business plan for my communications consulting firm. And I'm working on that. But being more of a big-picture type, I measure my success by the breadth of the relationships I have cultivated and kept over the course of my life and career. As I look back over the past 15 years of my professional life, I see a network of friends, colleagues and acquaintances... These relationships are what I have to show for my life and work thus far, and they will be critical to my success in the future."

And here is an example of how measures of success can be revised in hindsight, and how history can be kinder than one's peers. Judged by his contemporaries on its initial goal, Ernest Shackleton's 1914 Endurance expedition to the South Pole was an utter bust; his ship was trapped in the ice and destroyed, and he abandoned his quest while still in the Weddell Sea. But, over the years since then, a different measure of success has elevated his expedition to one of the most famous examples of survival against great odds. Today, Shackleton and his crew are remembered for surviving two years of extreme hardship, and not losing a single man.

If you'd like to share your own interesting and inspirational measures of success, perhaps from your own life, please write to us.