(potentially) on going thoughts about social sector leadership

For the past six months or so those of us on staff at the Bresee Foundation have been going through the process of rethinking our mission and developing a new strategic plan. I am very glad we have embarked on this project and if nothing else we are now all asking ourselves and each other, "are we making an impact, what impact are we making, and how can we be more effective?"
Partly for my own development and partly to gain deeper insight into our efforts to become a better organization I've been revisiting some older books on organizational theory and the like, among them Jim Collins' monograph "Good to Great and the Social Sectors." In this short booklet Collins attempts to translate his ideas from his book "Good to Great" to address the realities of the social sector. He rejects the simplistic view that the social sector "needs to be more like business." He argues that while the same principles of leadership apply in both the business and the social sector, their application must fit the situation of an organization.
The first step in his cycle is to define "greatness," to have some tangible metrics that will guide an organization. When I've been in conversations about how to grow organizationally with social workers, teachers, church leaders and not-for-profit types this is often one of the first things to come up. "But the work we do just can't be measured by... [insert noun here--e.g. tests, numbers, budget, etc.]"
Let me preface my comments by admitting that I myself have an ambivalent relationship to "metrics" when used in these settings. I like to point out to anyone who will listen to me that numbers (ones and zeros) are the language of machines; the language of human life is based in narratives. I, like most of my post-whateverism brethren, find the modernist obsession with numbers and quantification to be destructively reductionist and inhumane.
With that said, I have become weary of the aforementioned protest--that for those of us in the social sector you simply cannot use some outcome to measure success or failure. Sure, let us be careful to not use overly reductionist numbers, outcomes, tests and the like, but for the love of God, let's strive for a high standard in whatever sector we happen to be in. Too often this objection is used as an excuse for laziness, lack of discipline, and a general tolerance for mediocrity.
Furthermore (and this is something Collins points out) the inadequacy of metrics is nothing unique to the social sector. It is just as true in business that a myopic fixation on one set of data can lead not to success and excellence but to mediocrity or bankruptcy. Quality of product pursued at the expense of profit margin is just as dangerous as single minded pursuit of profit margin at the expense of brand reputation. Therefore, we can claim no distinction for the social sector when we say "to pursue test scores alone is to water down the quality of our education by encouraging teaching to the test."
A second and more nuanced objection to the call to identify measurable goals to define mission success or failure is that it will simply encourage deceptive practices to "meet the numbers." No doubt this is true. Under no child left behind, for example, there are bound to be teachers who go beyond simply teaching to the test and feed actual answers to their students to goose the numbers. A less deceptive but no less damaging practice is "creaming"--that is, skimming off the easy "outcomes" to boost one's numbers. So for example, scholarship funds aimed at increasing college access among low income or minority students may end up boosting a small number of high achieving students and leaving behind the large majority who are struggling with middling grades from underperforming schools.
You can add more of your own examples--there is no shortage. But once more I ask, how is that different from the business sector? Surely if we learned anything from the past five years it is that the business world is quite capable of creating false numbers; of reaching for short term gains without a long term perspective; of creating the false appearance of success? From Lehman Brothers hiding bad assets off the books to most of Wall Street relentlessly pursuing foolish lending practices to GM doggedly producing inferior product the business world is rife with such practices. The social sector has not cornered the market on the production of a false appearance of success.
The crucial question for both the business and the social sectors is how can we create organizations that tirelessly pursue excellence and quality in the fullest and deepest sense of the terms? How do we set goals that guide us there, and how do we maintain the discipline to pursue not just the appearance of success but rather a constant refinement of our concept of success?