Night 2 of the DNC: Michelle Obama Lights it Up

Okay, I know, I'm a week behind on catching up with speeches at the Democratic National Convention (DNC). Just this evening I watched some of the highlights from Night 2, which was last Tuesday. But please— no spoilers! I haven't finished the series yet. 🤣

Night 2 featured a bunch of great speeches. Some who were made fun of even on not-rightwing programs actually did pretty good jobs. Doug Emhoff and J.B. Pritzker, I'm looking at you. Former President Barack Obama spoke; and, as usual, he was eloquent and inspiring. But even his oration paled slightly as he had the toughest act to follow. The standout speech of the night was delivered by his wife, former First Lady Michelle Obama.

Much has been made of how Michelle Obama then— in her speech to the 2016 DNC— is different from Michelle Obama now. To me the difference was like this:



Okay, Michelle didn't actually say, "Lemme tell you about this weird, orange-faced mf...." But it sure felt like it. 2024 Michelle Obama spat some fire in her speech.

It was so refreshing to hear her put aside the quote from 2016 she's so indelibly linked with, "When they go low, we go high." Because the truth is, when your opponent lies as much as hers does, you can't just talk about your noble ideals. You've got to call out selfishness, hatred, and lies for what they are.

And yeah, I'm only, like, the 10,000th person to offer a meme about Michelle Obama. But here's the other thing about everybody celebrating her taking her dragging former President Donald Trump in her speech.... Going on the attack was only a small part of her speech. Michelle Obama was uplifting and inspiring. With just the right amount of ass-kicking.

Metrics

I'm thinking again about metrics in the workplace. I'm specifically referring to metrics on human work. For example, "How many tasks did each person on the team complete last week?" "What's the average time for a person to do X?" "What percentage of their time is this person/this team spending on category Y?"

It's not a new thought, as I've dealt with business metrics for most of my career. I've even studied them in school as far back as the late 1980s. Plus, the idea of applying modern observation and statistics to how people do things in business dates back to the late 19th century. Metrics aren't exactly new.

But while metrics in business aren't new, often it sure does feel like everybody's just figuring them out for the first time. That's surprising to me because when I was learning about the science of process measurement in the 1980s, a lot of the pitfalls of collecting statistics on people's work were already known. They'd already been known of, and studied, for 50 years. But here we are 30+ years later and it seems 98% of everybody clamoring for metrics has no idea.

I figure the reason for that is that collecting metrics and viewing analytics reports is trivially easy now. So much of our work is managed through computer software. With the computer already in the loop, metrics fall out practically for free. Anyone can suddenly get reams of data and colorful charts. But what do those charts mean? What are the limits of usefulness, accuracy, and predictive power behind the colorful lines, boxes, and pie wedges? When metrics were kind of a specialty, you'd have a person educated in the field to set up, collect, and interpret the data. You'd have an expert with the numbers. Now any noob can get numbers, which means any noob can suddenly feel confident their novice opinion is correct because they've got data.