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More Music Every Hour! ©2022, George J. Irwin. All rights reserved. This page in the notebook is all about manipulating metrics.
The idea of listening to the radio as the source for music may seem hopelessly in the past at this point, but it wasn’t that long ago when it was still how we heard our favorite songs and learned about new records. Back then, there was fierce competition in the radio business. One of the main points of contention was which station played more music. In Black Belt Land, we would have called it a Key Performance Metric. In the New York City area where I lived at the time, there were several stations playing approximately the same type of music, and they all bragged about how much of each hour was devoted to music, as opposed to, you know, commercials. One station, though, actually could brag that they played More Music Every Hour. Because they played songs about five percent faster than they were supposed to be played. That’s right, a 45 RPM single at 47 ½ RPM! (“What is a ‘45’, Grandpa?”) This drove me crazy: I knew the song was being played too fast, and it didn’t sound right to me because it was playing too fast, but it was hard to explain to people that it didn’t sound right because it wasn’t playing so much faster than many listeners could easily perceive it. But that, folks, is how to achieve a Key Performance Metric. There is no question that this particular radio station did play “More Music Every Hour!” So, Six Sigma Practitioners, this is, yes, another aspect of Measurement System Analysis—one of the many tools in the Overstuffed Tool Bag. It’s not enough to determine whether the Key Performance Metrics are sufficiently aligned to Customer Requirements, and that the Key Metrics don’t conflict with each other (a topic for another day), and that Secondary Metrics align with the Key Performance Metrics. You have to look out to see if someone is gaming the system in order to make it appear as though a Key Performance Metric is in fact being met when it isn’t. (Put those records back on 45 RPM and the station wouldn’t be any different than any other one in the market.) I didn’t know there were any other Black Belts besides the one that could be obtained in Karate when the radio station in question played More Music Every Hour, but many years later, I still use this incident to explain how those in charge of a process can manipulate it to their advantage. Fortunately, this didn’t happen very often, because it is also rarely as easy to see, or in the case of More Music Every Hour, to hear. ... |