New Ways to Measure Claims Success

An ancient Hindustani parable tells the tale of six scholarly blind men and their encounter with an elephant. Each wise man stated his understanding of the nature of elephants based entirely on his single perspective and limited senses. Unable to see the whole animal, to each, respectively, the elephant was very much like a spear (tusk), a snake (trunk), a tree (leg), a rope (tail), a wall (body) or a large fan (ear) depending on the part they encountered. As a child with vivid memories of trips to the zoo, I always felt sorry for the blind man pulling on the tail, thinking he may just as easily have believed the elephant to be a fertilizer-dispensing machine.