I agree with you.

Wanting to measure everything in order to manage it is an extremely persistent (and pernicious) holdover from Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management and in my opinion is an increasingly obsolete assumption in a world where more and more work gets done online every day.

In my mind I liken the "manage - measure" phrase to the continuing insistence of many labour unions in 2008 to see job descriptions and work rules as a key source of their power ... an outdated anachronism resulting from an inability to imagine other was of doing things.