Remembering some management-success stories from business school, Charlie decided to assign two people, Fred and Jack, to the project. He would later determine who was more effective, then have that person train and guide new people who might be needed in tech support. But how to decide? He couldn't listen to every phone call.

Then he remembered a lesson from his engineering days: You don't really understand something, an old professor insisted, unless you can quantify it. You can't be sure of anything unless you can measure it. It's not real if you can't give it numbers.

That goes for job effectiveness, too, Charlie realized. You should be able to measure that, just as you can measure voltage or current or kilobytes per second.

But how to measure. You can't go out and buy a job-effectiveness meter. Then he saw the solution, an obvious one. Easy, too. He would determine the number of phone calls Fred and Jack each handled in a day. To make sure the two men didn't sit around shooting the breeze, Charlie let them know he expected a good day's work; he'd count the calls they handled.

Fred won the contest easily. If a customer called with a problem, Fred first suggested that the problem was not with his company's product. Couldn't the problem lie with something else in the system? If the customer insisted that he had checked everything else, Fred provided a quick answer. If the customer called back with the same problem, Fred provided another quick answer. Fred was loaded with quick answers.

Jack spent more time with customers. He realized that customers weren't stupid; the obvious solution had probably occurred to the customer, too. And he didn't want to brush off customers by telling them to read the manual. Most callers had already tried the obvious and most had studied the manual. Jack wanted to understand the problem more fully before offering a solution. He didn't get many repeat calls, but he left a lot of satisfied customers.

Unfortunately, Charlie was measuring phone contacts, not customer satisfaction. He fired Jack and gave Fred a raise.