Outcome Assessment Quotes

In many spheres of human endeavor, from science to business to education to economic policy, good decisions depend on good measurement.

Too many policies, programs and institutions are judged by what they are supposed to do, rather than by what they actually do and the consequences of their actions.

You can't count a man out because one record went different direction. You gotta count the things that scored, not the misses.

You always try to take the positives and negatives out of the game.

I have been struck again and again by how important measurement is to improving the human condition.

I don't think you can predict success, but you get a feeling if something's going to be good or bad.

Progress is made where progress is measured.

The difference between a policy and a crusade is that a policy is judged by its results, while a crusade is judged by how good it makes its crusaders feel.

To go to war, you must always think of, can you win?

In order to learn how to do something well, you have to fail sometimes. In order to fail, there has to be a measurement system. And that's the problem with most philanthropy - there's no measurement system. You give somebody some money to do something and most of the time you can really never measure whether you failed or succeeded in your judgment of that person or his ideas or their implementation.

If a problem is too difficult to solve, one cannot claim that it is solved by pointing at all the efforts made to solve it.

Thoughts are but dreams till their effects are tried.

The crucial question for any policy is not what, are its intentions, but what are its effects?

Every advantage in the past is judged in the light of the final issue.

The wise policymaker doesn't assume that any policy adopted in good faith will have good results. Instead, he or she weighs the likely outcome of any new policy based on facts and experience - not sentiments and dreams.

My top priority will be to secure maximum value for money in aid through greater transparency, rigorous independent evaluation and an unremitting focus on results.

I think it's a trial balloon to see what happens, and I'm not impressed with it.

There was kind of a no-nonsense parenting style that my parents had that was true of the time. Everything now... there are books, and there are websites, and there are blogs, and you're reading, and there's research. We're such an interconnected world now, and half the stuff they did was pretty terrible, but we somehow turned out fine.

We don’t have any metrics on that.

I was secretary of the Treasury when the credit bubble burst, so I think it's fair to say that I know a little bit about risk, assessing outcomes, and problem-solving.

At the end of the day, is Singapore society better or worse off? That's the test.

It's very difficult to tell when you're successful, because it's so hard to make measurements.

In life every effort is marked down at the end as a win or a loss.

You must wait until the end, and at the end of the season you can say it was a good or a bad season.

There aren't a lot of situations where I look back and I say, The decision I actually made or the course we actually pursued was the wrong course.