Business plan competitions measure business planning. I once worked for a company that had won an award as "One of the 50 best managed private companies in Canada" several years running.
The procedure for judging this award consisted of accountants coming in and measuring the degree to which our decisions were driven by documented, repeatable processes. At no time did they measure how well our products were selling, the quality of the talent we were able to attract, or our turnover.
My point being that there are means and ends, and when you put a lot of work into measuring the means, you get a lot of emphasis on means. I will NOT suggest that your ends automatically suffer, just that the correlation between repeatable and universal ways of measuring means and the ends you achieve are loose at best.
The procedure for judging this award consisted of accountants coming in and measuring the degree to which our decisions were driven by documented, repeatable processes. At no time did they measure how well our products were selling, the quality of the talent we were able to attract, or our turnover.
My point being that there are means and ends, and when you put a lot of work into measuring the means, you get a lot of emphasis on means. I will NOT suggest that your ends automatically suffer, just that the correlation between repeatable and universal ways of measuring means and the ends you achieve are loose at best.