From my background in travel at HotWire and Expedia, the metrics that TaskRabbit is seeing are more than double at what I saw at both those companies.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
The tendency in lots of large organizations is to try and find a comfortable place where you think you can get measured rewards for measured work.
Vanity metrics are the numbers you want to publish on TechCrunch to make your competitors feel bad.
The way we measure productivity is flawed. People checking their BlackBerry over dinner is not the measure of productivity.
It is much more difficult to measure nonperformance than performance.
Computers double their performance every month.
Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies.
Your typical business just measures the metrics that have to do with the profitability of the business one way or another. But you can have metrics that measure employee happiness and the morale. You can also do direct customer surveys; you can track it over time. You can do supplier satisfaction scores as well.
What you measure and reward is what you're going to get.
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
I'm not familiar with the metric system.