I found the famous McNamara fallacy quote

Daniel Yankelovich coined the term ‘McNamara fallacy’ on October 15, 1971 during a speech titled ‘The New Odds’ at the eleventh annual Marketing Strategy Conference of the Sales Executives Club of New York. This speech is the origin of the term ‘McNamara fallacy’ and the original source of his famous McNamara fallacy quote:

Here is what happens when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally: The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is okay as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can’t be easily measured or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

I know this, because I paid the UC San Diego Library ten dollars and fifty cents for a copy of the speech’s original transcript which is housed in their archives:

I’ve always loved the quote, and for years it fittingly anchored the fallacy’s Wikipedia page. But in 2023, editors realized that the attributed source (a 1972 magazine article by Yankelovich) was inaccessible and replaced the quote with a slightly different (but sourceable) version. In November of 1971, Yankelovich included a condensed version of the ‘four steps’ quote in an article titled “Interpreting the New Life Styles” for the magazine Sales Management:

But when the McNamara discipline is applied too literally, the first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. The second step is to disregard that which can’t easily be measured or given a quantitative value. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily really isn’t important. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.

This version is slightly inferior, lacking the rhythm of the escalating analyses (‘okay’, ‘misleading’, ‘blindness’, ‘suicide’). Now that I’ve found the original source, I plan to reintroduce it on Wikipedia.

Access to this primary source also clears up several misconceptions on the fallacy’s Wikipedia page, including the idea that Yankelovich’s quote is in reference to McNamara’s tenure at Ford. While he discusses Ford in the speech, the quote above is in direct reference to the Vietnam war (a connection for which Yankelovich deserves credit).

The original quote continues:

Among the many bitter lessons that our experience in Vietnam with its body counts and village pacification ratios has driven home, is the conclusion that it is a short, fatal step from the statement, “There are many intangibles and imponderables that we can’t put on our computers,” to the statement, “Let’s measure what we can and forget about the intangibles.” It is this step that poses an even greater danger to us in the future than in the past.

The rest of the speech is excellent and contains other incisive quotes that, as far as I can tell, are not accessibly reproduced anywhere online. I plan to locate the copyright holder and request permission to share the transcript in its entirety.

How I found it

I have to say I am pretty proud of finding the original source of the quote. I have always loved the phrasing and I’m glad I could validate its provenance. For educational purposes, I’m going to try and reproduce the Google-fu that eventually led me to the source.

Originally, Wikipedia attributed the speech version of the quote to another magazine article from 1972: “Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business”. An exact search for this reveals a number of citations, though many modern ones have clearly copied the citation from Wikipedia without the source.

However, other earlier citations are consistent with the quote and with each other, including an article from 2002 which contains the exact speech quote attributed to the same ‘Corporate Priorities’ article. The same citation is used in this article from 1975, though I don’t have access to the article text.

The actual first result when searching the full ‘Corporate Priorities’ title is a 2023 Reddit post from u/Orb_Dylan questioning the authenticity of the Wikipedia citation:

Great quote, I want to read the book. … wait. _ google searches _ I can’t find this book listed anywhere. Weird. Not even a cover. A lof of citations on exactly this quote.

Let’s call a bunch of academic friends of mine that have access to larger libraries and databases.

Nope. This book it’s not even listed in Yankelovich publications (a real person with many publications).

So… where that comes from??

The top reply is from u/StrictSheepherder361, who identifies two appearances of the quote in publications from the turn of the century: a 1994 paper by Dylan Williams from the British Educational Research Association (BERA) journal titled “Towards a philosophy for educational assessment” and a 2002 paper by Sikandar Hasan titled “Literature Review of Poverty and Urban Development Indicators”. Both papers cite other, non-Yankelovich works for the quote in a diverging chain of references. The reply concludes:

I have chosen not-too-new papers on purpose, to ignore Wikipedia-inspired noise. So, it looks like one of those quotations attributed to Einstein, or G.B. Shaw, or Oscar Wilde, and then repeated ad nauseam (by people quoting people who quoted people who…) without anybody checking the sources any more.

The only second-level reply is from u/Card_Zero, who follows up on the first citation chain to find that it eventually attributes the quote back to Yankelovich. The comment also surfaces other citations of the quote attributed to Yankelovich, including one which cites the ‘Corporate Priorities’ article.

In the only other comment thread on the post, the same two users exchange additional citations which ends with this comment from u/Card_Zero:

Edit 2: I found a source for the quote before 1972! “Interpreting the New Life Styles”, an article written by Yankelovich in 1971

And looking at the Wikipedia history it seems like this is the same user who replaced the original quote:

A fellow McNamara fallacy historian! The Wikipedia history also shows the introduction of the confusion about Vietnam, which the speech includes but the “Interpreting the New Life Styles” article does not. It’s all coming together, but where is the original quote?

The 1994 Wililams paper cites Charles Handy’s The Empty Raincoat, which can be previewed on the Internet Archive (credit again to u/Card_Zero). For some reason, Handy misattributes the full quote to McNamara (rather than Yankelovich), misspelling the former’s name in the process:

Unfortunately, Mcnamara was right. He said, in what has come to be known as the Macnamara Fallacy:

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured…

The trail seemed to be running cold. I continued to Google and chase citation trails through Internet Archive with no success; authors cited other authors who inevitably cited the Yankelovich ‘Corporate Priorities’ article. But where was it??

Then, finally, a hit: a Google Books search for the full article title turned up seven results, one of which was “Private Enterprise and Public Purpose” (1981) by S. Prakash Sethi and Carl Swanson. Google Books lets you search for content but only provides a tiny preview window so with every result I opened I would search for “Yankelovich” to pull up the citation. When I got to “Private Enterprise and Public Purpose”, this search turned up a new citation:

When you Google (quotes included) <”Daniel Yankelovich” “the new odds”> there are two results. The first is the University of California library system entry for the Daniel Yankelovich Papers which contains the transcript of the speech containing the original quote. Yahtzee! I made an account, requested a copy, paid the $10.50 retrieval fee, and a few days later had a PDF transcript of The New Odds in my inbox.

The second result is the Wikipedia Humanities reference desk page from March 11, 2023. In it, our old friend ‘Card Zero’, along with another user ‘Lambiam’ (who I assume was responding for the desk), details a similar trawling for the original quote source. Lambian followed a different citation trail and came up with an interesting theory:

An early appearance of both the report’s full title and the longer quotation is found in: S. Prakash Sethi, “Corporate Social Audit: An Emerging Trend in Measuring Corporate Social Performance”, a chapter in: Dow Votaw, S. Prakash Sethi (1973), The Corporate Dilemma: Traditional Values Versus Contemporary Problems, Prentice Hall, ISBN 0131741934. The report is cited in a footnote on page 221 as: Corporate Priorities: A Continuing Study of the New Demands on Business (Stanford [sic], Conn.: Daniel Yankelovich, Inc., n.d.), but the McNamara Fallacy is only presented on page 228, where it is cited to: Daniel Yankelovich, “The New Odds,” a paper presented at the Eleventh Annual Marketing Strategy Conference of the Sales Executives Club of New York, October 15, 1971. My provisional conclusion is that later citations have mixed up things, and that the quotation is most likely not found as such in the report on the study.

What a trip! Salute to my fellow travelers and Yankelovich enthusiasts – you’ll hear from me soon!