"If Groupon was Battletoads, it would be like I made it all the way to the Terra Tubes without dying on my first ever play through."

Wow, that's actually kinda a perfect analogy. I totally understand.

"If you can't measure it you can't manage it" is a classic management platitude. I doubt Meg Whitman was the first person to say it.

Furthermore, it's completely untrue. Many things that must be managed are incompletely measurable, and almost everything in knowledge work falls into that category. See Robert Austin's excellent "Measuring and Managing Performance in Organizations" for a scientific exploration of the topic. (It's a more accessible version of his Ph.D. thesis.) His insights are applicable to more than just performance measurement.

It was Drucker actually.

Peter Drucker, actually. Also incorrectly attributed to Deming (who, um, would disagree).

Different strokes for different folks.