Tell Me How You Measure Me: Goldratt on the Numbers That Steer Your Job
Updated: Aug 31
ISSUE 12 · AUGUST 27, 2026
Every jobsite has a number that always looks good.
Maybe it's Percent Plan Complete. Week after week the weekly work plan comes back at 95%, and the schedule keeps sliding anyway. Nobody's lying to you. The number is accurate. It just stopped measuring what you thought it measured.
Eli Goldratt called this decades ago, and he wasn't gentle about it. From The Haystack Syndrome (1990): "Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, do not complain about illogical behavior."
That's not cynicism about people. It's a description of what competent people do under pressure. A metric isn't a thermometer that quietly reads the temperature of your job. It's a steering wheel. The minute you publish a number and attach consequences to it, people start driving toward the number — and if the number and the goal aren't the same thing, they'll drive away from the goal to reach it.
Which brings us back to PPC.
Percent Plan Complete is a good metric — one of the better things the Last Planner System gave this industry. Of the tasks your team promised this week, what share actually got done? Reliability in one number. But it has a well-documented failure mode, and Jason Schroeder's team at Elevate Construction names it flatly: in a CPM-based Last Planner setup you're aiming for PPC above 80%, and hitting 100% usually means the team is playing it safe. The industry term for it is sandbagging.
Think about the incentive. If missing a commitment costs you in Monday's meeting, the rational move isn't to get better at delivering. It's to promise less. Commit only to the work that was going to finish anyway. Keep the risky items off the list. PPC climbs into the nineties and parks there.
You set out to measure commitment-keeping. What you got was commitment-shrinking.
Once you see it, you see it all over a job. Measure a superintendent on manpower and you'll get bodies on site whether or not there's work for them. Measure RFI turnaround and you'll get fast answers — including the thin ones that generate a second RFI two weeks later. Measure a crew on units installed and the easy units go in first, which is how a job hits 80% complete and then spends four months on the last 20%. None of those people are gaming you. They're doing what the scoreboard told them to do.
Here's the test, and it takes about thirty seconds per metric. Take any number you report and ask: if someone wanted to move this number without doing the underlying work, how would they do it? If the answer comes to you quickly, it'll come to everyone else quickly too. Under enough schedule pressure, somebody will take it — and they won't feel like they're cheating, because they aren't. They're hitting the target you gave them.
The fix usually isn't to throw the metric out. It's to pair it, so the shortcut stops working. PPC alone rewards small promises; PPC next to the volume of work committed doesn't. Units installed alone rewards cherry-picking; units installed in the zones the schedule actually needs doesn't. Schroeder's team tracks two that are hard to game by design — perfect handoff percentage (did the trade ahead hand off complete and on time, target 80%+) and roadblock removal average (how many days before impact constraints get cleared). You can't move either without doing the real work.
And say out loud what the number is for. "We track PPC to find where our system breaks" and "we track PPC to see who's falling behind" are the same number and two completely different jobs.
Something to consider Designing a metric is mostly an exercise in imagination — picturing every way your own number could be satisfied without the work getting done — and it helps to borrow an imagination that isn't yours. Take the weekly report you actually send: metric names, definitions, targets. Hand it to an AI chat and ask it to argue the other side. Here's how I'm measuring this team. List every way someone could hit these targets without improving the project. Some of what comes back will be obvious. The useful ones are usually the shortcuts you'd never take yourself, which is exactly why they never occurred to you. Then ask what a counter-metric would be for each. What it can't tell you is which of those shortcuts your people would actually take, or what your owner cares about this month. But it's a fast, private way to pressure-test a scoreboard before you hang it on the trailer wall.
So try this before your next report goes out. Pick the one number your team reports most often, and answer the question honestly: what behavior does this reward when someone is behind and out of time? If you don't love the answer, you probably don't need a new dashboard. You need one more column.
Steel Market Snapshot
Late August 2026 — structural is where the increases are landing.
Wide-Flange Beams $1,700/ton ▲ +$50/ton Aug 3 · mill list, RMS incl. | Channel & Angle +$80/ton ▲ Aug 3 · 7th MBQ channel hike of 2026 |
HSS / Tube +$140/ton ▲ Jul 21 + Aug 7 (Nucor Tubular) | Plate $1,395/ton ▲ SSAB +$40 Aug 24 · HSLA adder now $100 |
Wide-flange beams are $1,700/net ton. That's Nucor-Yamato's list dated Aug. 3, replacing June 8, at $85.00/cwt with the RMS surcharge included, covering most common sections — W8x8, W10x10, W12x4–x10, W14x5–x10, W16, W21x6.5/x8.25, W24x7. Steel Dynamics' Aug. 3 list is the same $85.00/cwt, and Argus put W8x8 at $1,700/ton ex-works in early August. Heavy sections go higher: W14x16 145–283 at $2,010, W27x14 217–235 at $2,105. C15 channel $1,720. MC12/13/18 $1,975. S-shapes $2,195. L8 angles $1,925. A588 adds $130–140/ton.
Nucor-Yamato and Gerdau raised beams, S-shapes and piling $50/ton, and channel, MC and angle $80/ton, on new orders from Aug. 3. Merchant bar took four more increases between mid-July and Aug. 10 — Nucor Bar Mill, Gerdau twice, and SDI — at $30 to $80/ton each. Argus counts seven MBQ channel increases in 2026. HSS moved fastest: Nucor Tubular added $60/ton on July 21 and $80/ton on Aug. 7. That's $140/ton in under three weeks.
Plate held at $1,395/ton on SMU's average through Aug. 25, but the base price isn't the whole bill. SSAB announced another $40/ton minimum on Aug. 24. Nucor kept its base flat for the October book and doubled the HSLA Grade 50 adder to $100/ton, which hits structural plate directly. Lead times are just over nine weeks, the longest since September 2021.
Sheet, for reference: hot-rolled averaged $1,200/ton on Aug. 27, rising in $5–15 weekly steps.
What to watch: 9% of buyers say mills will negotiate, the lowest since September 2021. Nucor-Yamato's truck fuel surcharge goes from 44% to 47% on Sept. 1. US–Canada trade talks collapsed Aug. 21, days after reports that Section 232 tariffs on Canadian steel might be halved; instead 50% tariffs hit a range of Canadian goods, and Prime Minister Carney has promised to match them. USW contracts at U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs expire Sept. 1 with the sides "far apart." Pointing the other way: the AIA/Deltek Architecture Billings Index read 46.6 in July, still contracting, and it leads nonresidential spending by nine to twelve months. For precon: price structural off the current mill list plus surcharge, not last quarter's, and keep bid validity windows short. For live data, visit our Market Informer page.
Sources & Further Reading
1. Goldratt, Eliyahu M. The Haystack Syndrome: Sifting Information Out of the Data Ocean. North River Press, 1990. ISBN 0884271846. (Origin of "Tell me how you measure me and I will tell you how I will behave. If you measure me in an illogical way, do not complain about illogical behavior.")
2. "Dr. Eli Goldratt Top 50 Quotes." Goldratt Consulting. goldrattgroup.com
3. Schroeder, Jason. "What Is The Last Planner System PPC?" Elevate Construction, April 17, 2025. elevateconstructionist.com (PPC formula; the >80% target and sandbagging at 100%; perfect handoff percentage and roadblock removal average.)
4. Ballard, Glenn. The Last Planner System of Production Control. PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2000. etheses.bham.ac.uk (Origin of PPC as a measure of planning reliability.)
5. Nucor-Yamato Steel Company. ASTM A992/A572-50 Price List, August 3, 2026 (replaces price list dated June 8, 2026). nucoryamato.com (All beam, channel, S-shape and angle transaction prices above; pricing includes the RMS surcharge.)
6. Nucor-Yamato Steel Company. Scrap Surcharge and Fuel Surcharge Update. nucoryamato.com (RMS effective Aug. 18, 2026; truck fuel surcharge 44% for August, 47% for September.)
7. Steel Dynamics, Structural & Rail Division. Beam Price List, August 3, 2026, and Beam Price Announcement, August 10, 2026. steeldynamics.com
8. Gerdau Long Steel North America. Pricing Announcements — Merchants and Beams, August 2026; Merchants, July and August 2026. gerdau.com
9. Nucor Tubular Products. Price Announcements, July 21, 2026 (+$60/ton) and August 7, 2026 (+$80/ton) on HSS, mechanical and piling products. nucortubular.com
10. Argus Media. "US EAF mills lift MBQ steel prices." August 12, 2026. argusmedia.com (Wide-flange 8x8 at $1,700/st ex-works; MBQ channel raised seven times in 2026.)
11. Steel Market Update. "SSAB to increase plate prices by $40/ton again." August 25, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
12. Steel Market Update. "Nucor maintains plate prices, opens October orderbook." August 28, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
13. Steel Market Update. "SMU Survey: Mill lead times remain historically long." August 20, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
14. Steel Market Update. "SMU Survey: Mill negotiability rate falls to multi-year low." August 20, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
15. Steel Market Update. "US, offshore hot band prices on the rise." August 27, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
16. Steel Market Update. "US-Canada trade talks collapse." August 22, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
17. Steel Market Update. "USW: USS, union 'far apart' on key issues ahead of Sept. 1 deadline." August 22, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
18. Steel Market Update. "AIA: Architecture business conditions remained soft in July." August 19, 2026. steelmarketupdate.com
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