Narrow KPIs delimit the potentials of academia. The story of three sons.

Generic KPI oriented performance is ruining Malaysian Higher Education
(Original piece Written March 15, 2018).
A thought on how academicians being reduced to paper churning authors and grants hoarders due to narrow Key Performance Indices (KPI):

There was a man, who had three sons. He hoped all his sons grow up to be useful people. Once they reach adulthood, he said to them "Go out on a journey for a year and be a useful person".

The first son immediately went off to the world and tried to be useful.

The second son, hesitated and asked the father, "what do you mean to be useful? Can you be more specific?". The father said " Go and find 10,000 poor people". So he went off to find poor people who are in need.

The Third son was still thinking, and said," I need to be more specific. How do you help poor people?".

The father said, "If you have wealth, you can help poor people".
"Ill do my best to find wealth" So off went the third son to find wealth.

After a year, all three came back. The father said, "now tell me what you have done".

1st son said, "I went to a village, the people didn't know how to read, so i taught them to read. The poor in the village didn't have enough food. So I persuaded the rich to help the poor. Once I found a donkey stuck in mud, I use all my strength to pull it out" The father smiled and said, "You have been useful".

The second son explain. "You told me to find poor people. I went on a journey, from town to town, trying to find them. Wherever I found them I record their names and addresses. Now I have in my hand, the names of 10,000 poor people and where to find them.
Father said, "Yes you managed to find the poor people, good, but have you been useful to them? "
Shamefully the son said "not really, I was busy finding them,..well, as you specified!"

The third son told his story, "I went to a village, they said there is a gold mine in the land but it is a long journey, so i traveled for a long time. Finally I  found the gold and and here all this gold is the result of my quest."

Looking at all the gold, the father asked, "with all this gold, have you been useful to anybody?

The third son said, "No. I didn't have the time yet.  I was busy finding gold, as you instructed me to find wealth".

You see the first son was useful because he never had restrictive definition to the word useful. Its up to him to decide how to be useful. And he can respond to his context fast. The second and third son was told of the specifics of what and how to be useful, too specific that they lost sight of the overall purpose to be 'useful'.

The moral of the story is, the more specific the kpis being set for the academicians, the more likely they will loose sight of their overarching purpose. Their purpose is to enlighten society. Enrich them in all possible aspects. But we have reduced them to focusing high quality papers, targeting Q1 n Q2, amassing large grants, and improve the university's position in the ranking game, with the assumptions eventually they will serve their overall purpose. But, with the carrot and stick approach they are treated, sometimes that's all they do. Producing papers, acquiring grants and play the ranking game. To the managers, the proof of usefulness is when the ranking jumps up few positions, or the numbers of high impact publication soars high. What these really mean to the real world out there, well as of now, nobody can explain.

Academicians are not like menial workers, they use brain muscles to perform duties. tell them the overall purpose, they will find means and ways to achieve it. But if you tell them the detail of what and how, they will be just another cog in the large machine called a university. No doubt they will push the machine forward, as instructed, but they will lose sight of where to go, because the directions have been decided by others.