General managers submit weekly reports, measuring factors like traffic and customer satisfaction. Every quarter, teams assess their priorities under an Intel-pioneered system called “objectives and key results.” And Mr. Pincus, a professed data obsessive, devours all the reports, using multiple spreadsheets, to carefully track the progress of Zynga’s games and its roughly 3,000 employees.
—

NYTimes.com on Zynga.

Ignore the rest of this article for a moment and just focus on Zynga’s data obsession, an obsession shared by many other start ups and one being adopted by established companies.

Here’s the rub: anything Excel can’t measure, Pincus can’t see.

(via dbreunig)