"What gets measured, gets done."  That quote, often attributed to Peter Drucker (actual origins are more obscure), has become the foundation for a secular religion that gets practiced everywhere from our personal health routines to understanding the advancement of people, the quality of community life and the sustainability of our shared environment.

For the past 20 years of so, I have followed the emergence of community progress reports. I am interested to see:

What gets measured and why.

What gets done about what gets measured.

What progress gets made.

There are hundreds of places measuring indicators of some kind of well being or success. These places vary in size and include neighborhoods, cities, regions, states, countries and just about every geographic entity in between. A collection of links to some of these reports is available here.

Louisville has its community measurement project, the ten-year-old Greater Louisville Project. Its mission is to act as a catalyst for action, providing research, data, and analytic tools in support of the agenda for long-term progress outlined in the 2002 Brookings Institution Report, Beyond Merger:  A Competitive Vision for the Regional City of Louisville.

The Greater Louisville Project publishes the  "Competitive City Report," tracking progress against three key community indicators: education, jobs and quality of place. These three are recognized as deep drivers that have been identified by Brookings as a few big, but attainable, goals that can inform our civic agenda by highlighting both the possibilities and the challenges facing Louisville. The latest GLP report is available here.

More recently, the organization CEOs for Cities advises urban leaders seeking success in the new economy to stop paying attention to city rankings and start focusing their attentions on four dimensions of success: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness.

CityVitals lays out the rationale for the things cities must be really good at doing today and a new set of metrics - 20 in all - to measure their progress.

The 64-page booklet, developed by Portland-based economist Joseph Cortright in partnership with CEOs for Cities, includes data on the top 50 metro areas in the U.S. for each of the 20 measures. It also looks at each citys Metro Performance (economic indicators) and its Core Vitality (the strength of the city's urban core).

"Every week it seems a new ranking of cities makes the headlines," said Carol Coletta, former president and CEO of CEOs for Cities, when CityVitals was introduced. Unfortunately, few of those rankings are relevant to what makes cities successful today. CityVitals gives urban leaders a much richer picture of whats going right and whats going wrong in their cities and uncovers their best opportunities to improve.

To be successful today, cities have to develop their own unique formula that addresses the four dimensions of urban success: talent, innovation, connections and distinctiveness, according to Cortright. No single city performs best on all these indicators. And these measures are very different from the traditional recipes of cutting taxes and building convention centers or arenas.

CityVitals enables urban residents to assess their city's performance on each of these four dimensions, to plot strategies to build on strengths and offset weaknesses, and establish a distinctive, winning and competitive strategy, he said.

The Four Dimensions, Metro Performance and Core Vitality:

The Talented City

CityVitals maintains that the indispensable asset in a knowledge economy is smart people. Cities are places where people build knowledge through education and experience. Cities attract smart people and create opportunities for them to develop and apply what they know. Measured by:

• College Attainment: Percentage of the metropolitan population 25 years old or older who have completed a four-year college degree. (Louisville ranks 44 of 50 cities, 24.5 percent)
• Creative Professionals: Percentage of workers employed as mathematicians, scientists, artists, engineers, architects and designers. (Louisville 45 of 50, 5.2 percent)
• Young & Restless: Percentage of the metropolitan population that are 25 to 34 years old who have completed at least a four-year college degree. (Louisville 38 of 50, 3.8 percent)
• Traded Sector Talent: Percentage of metropolitan workers who have a college degree and are employed in private sector businesses excluding health care and education. (Louisville 41 of 50, 22.9 percent)
• International Talent: Percentage of metropolitan population 25 years and older who have completed a college degree and were born outside the United States. (Louisville 43 of 50, 6.8 percent)

The Innovative City

The ability to generate new ideas and to turn those ideas into reality is a critical source of competitive advantage not just for businesses but for regions, as well. Economies and regions advance by a process of trial and error. Those places that generate many trials of novel products and services are most likely to move ahead. Measured by:

• Patents: Number of utility patents issued per 1,000 population. (Louisville 45 of 50, 2.7)
• Venture Capital: Amount of venture capital raised per 1,000 population. (Louisville 46 of 50, $5)
• Self-Employment: Percent of the adult population who are self-employed. (Louisville 39 of 50, 7.5 percent)
• Small Businesses: Number of firms with fewer than 20 employees per 1,000 population. (Louisville 33 of 50, 15.6)

The Connected City

Cities thrive as places where people can easily interact and connect. These connections are of two sorts: the easy interaction of local residents and easy connections to the rest of the world. Both internal and external connections are important. Internal connections help promote the creation of new ideas and make cities work better for their residents. External connections enable people and businesses to tap into the global economy. Measured by:

• Voting: Number of votes cast in the November 2004 presidential election divided by the voting age population of the metropolitan area. (Louisville 15 of 50, 62.7 percent)
• Community Involvement: Percentage of the metropolitan area population who reported volunteering for a community activity in the past year. (Louisville 22 of 50, 51.1 percent)
• Economic Integration: Percentage of the population who would not have to move from their current neighborhoods in order to equalize the distribution of high-income and low-income households across all neighborhoods in the metropolitan area. (Louisville 25 of 50, 60.3 percent)
• Transit Use: Percentage of non-poor households that use public transportation at least once per week. (Louisville among 11 of the 50 for which no data were available at time of compiling CityVitals)
• International Students: Number of foreign students enrolled in institutions of higher education in the metropolitan area per 1,000 population. (Louisville 43 of 50, 9.9)
• Foreign Travel: Percent of the population reporting taking a trip outside the United States. (Louisville 50 of 50, 10.8 percent)
• Internet Connectivity: Number of wi-fi hotspots per 100,000 population. (Louisville 13 of 50, 16.4)

The Distinctive City

The unique characteristics of place may be the only truly defensible source of competitive advantage for regions. In a world of global competition, a strategy of pretty much the same, maybe cheaper is a recipe for mediocrity and economic stagnation. Measured by:

• Weirdness Index: Average of the extent to which the metropolitan areas10 most distinctive consumer behaviors exceed the national norm for each behavior. (Louisville 43 of 50, 113.3)
• Culture/Cable Ratio: Ratio of persons attending cultural events to number of persons regularly watching cable television. (Louisville 48 of 50, 22.5 percent)
• Restaurant Variety: Ratio of ethnic restaurants to fast food restaurants in the metropolitan area. (Louisville 49 of 50, 7.9 percent)
• Movie Variety: Variance of local movie attendance from national movie attendance for the top 60 motion pictures nationally in 2005. (Louisville 26 of 50, 3.7 percent)

Metro Performance:

For each metropolitan area, key indicators of economic well-being are examined: per capita income and the rate of poverty. Urban areas that do well in generating and attracting talent, encouraging innovation, building connections and capitalizing on distinctiveness are the best positioned to improve the income of their residents and to reduce poverty, especially in the long run.

Core Vitality:

A strong urban core also plays a critical economic role. The urban center of metropolitan areas is the focus of cultural activities, civic identity, governmental institutions and usually has the densest employment, particularly in financial, professional and creative services. Urban cores are also the iconic centers of cities, where interaction and connections are strongest. To measure the vibrancy of urban centers, the income, educational attainment and poverty levels of the urban neighborhoods within five miles of the center of each regions central business district are computed.

Lessons from the history of community indicators projects

LESSON 1: Having a number does not necessarily mean that you have a good indicator.

A common mistake in working on social indicators is to believe that because some official agency has measured something, an indicator based on that measure is likely to be valuable.

One way to think of indicators (and there are many ways) is to consider them quantities that reveal qualities. It is easy to find numbers that tell us the magnitude of something: the number of inhabitants of a city, vehicle miles traveled, the acres planted in various crops, the number of children vaccinated in a given year.

What is much harder to develop are numbers that tell us about quality. The best that can be done is to devise numerical measures from which a quality can be inferred. It is as if what we most want to measure is something that we cannot see if we look directly at it; we can see it only out of the corner of the eye. As better quality indicators are developed, older quantity measures seem out of place.

LESSON 2: Effective indicators require a clear conceptual basis.

To create a good indicator, it takes thought and time clarifying exactly what is being measured. Otherwise the indicator may measure something other that what was intended.

This may seem like obvious advice, but it is not easy to do in practice. There is an understandable tendency for groups intent on developing indicators to start compiling data right away without a clear understanding of what needs to be measured. Taking the time to develop conceptual clarity seems to many people a kind of useless intellectual exercise. Although measurement can help clarify a concept, the concept itself will not simply emerge from the data.

LESSON 3: There is no such thing as a value-free indicator.

All serious indicators work is political. The very act of deciding what to count and how to count it involves making value judgments. Because all indicators are laden with values or carry implicit messages, indicator reports really cannot be neutral. Consideration of the values or concept underlying each indicator can lead to a more balanced presentation. But omitting analysis or interpretation does not make an indicators report neutral.

LESSON 4: Comprehensiveness may be the enemy of effectiveness.

A narrow range of indicators is more powerful than a laundry list. Historically, the most powerful indicators work has focused on a single issue. It has moved people to look beyond the most obvious features of a situation and to ask deeper questions than before. If an indicators project emphasizes more than two or three indicator categories, that is unlikely to happen. It is natural to explore all of the facets of society by using many indicators to paint a detailed picture. However, it is more effective to find a few insightful and compelling indicators that represent that complex whole.

A corollary to this is that the story told by the indicators is probably more important than the indicators themselves. A large book of indicators with little interpretation does not clearly depict the state of a community's health or point at what needs to be done. The indicators may be of interest to specific, narrow audiences, but probably not to the general public. Fewer is probably better than more.

LESSON 5: The symbolic value of an indicator may outweigh its value as a literal measure.

Most of us are accustomed to thinking of accounting as pretty cut-and-dried. Numbers satisfy our desire for understanding when we are being literal-minded about information. "What's the bottom line?" is the question people often ask when they want just the straight facts.

Although numerical data often serve the purpose of reporting literal facts, it is important to keep in mind that numbers can also act as metaphors. That is especially true of index numbers which combine a variety of factors. In those cases, it is often not clear what the index number measures in concrete terms, so it can only function as a metaphor. This metaphorical function of an indicator may be what distinguishes it most from a statistic.

LESSON 6: Don't conflate indicators with reality.

Indicators can help us understand complex situations by condensing an array of information into a simple number or graph. Yet there is always a danger that the indicator itself will be taken for the underlying reality. It is easy to become intellectually lazy and forget the complex process that created the number that serves as a proxy for the concept. This hardening of concepts then stands in the way of deep and nuanced understanding; the number becomes a barrier to the truth.

Every indicator is a flawed representative of a complex set of events. Confusing the statistic with the reality is all too common, but it should be avoided by those who care about creating high-quality indicators. Even the best indicator is only a fractional measurement of the underlying reality.

Measures that matter

Fostering successful cities is far more complex than any single list can reflect. And even some sophisticated measures, such as job and population growth, are outdated tools in the knowledge economy.

The challenge is for us is to figure out the unique positions and opportunities of our region and build on them. But let us not get too attached to strategies, directions and measures that can become quickly outmoded in a complex, rapidly evolving world.