This paper argues US manufacturers still fail to identify metrics that predict performance results despite two decades of intensive investment in data-mining applications because indicators with the power to predict complex results must have high information content as well as a high impact on those results.

Two challenges facing U.S. businesses raise the question of how well our performance management systems are performing. One: Although average worker productivity has risen briskly for two decades average wages have stagnated. Two: The flattening of U.S. consumer...

From seeing risks as generally matching rewards and risk avoidance as little safer than risk taking over much of the past 60 years, business has returned to the darker pre-war view that what can go wrong will do so.