Okay, okay: it was not the entire purpose of this essay on CMM to lead up to a polemic against the overuse of bogus, unsubstantiated and unsubstantiable quantitative metrics in the nonprofit assessment arena.  It was only 86.59203% of the purpose.  Consequently, 13.40797% of the purpose of the CMM essay went directly to program, meaning, the application of CMM to nonprofits, and those lessons are valuable!  Of the 86.59203% that went to discussing troublemaking topics like why the term “overhead” is necessarily devoid of meaning in nonprofit contexts, those who make their bread and butter from utilizing such statistics might prefer I not speak.  But I stand by my statement in Growth through Governance (p. 278):

“Unjustified precision is a statistical fib.  And claims to measure percentage operational efficiency seem like unjustified precision par excellence to me.  I am not about to believe it is possible to distinguish 90% from 91% efficiency in any operating organization.  If indeed not, then such numbers ironically cause a great deal of inefficiency and waste.”

What do you think?  Discuss!