Management reporting systems are like power tools. They help you improve performance quickly and effectively, but one careless moment can cause irreparable damage and serious injury. This course encourages both deep skepticism about performance measures and pragmatic recognition of how useful they can be. Thoughtless adherence to performance measures leads many to decry “bean counters,” and emphasize that “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Yet something gets counted whenever we need to make critical decisions throughout the workplace, politics and daily life. This course will help students interpret the performance measures generated by the managerial reporting systems most pervasive in modern organizations, design systems that generate more useful measures, and make better use those measures — even when what gets counted is but a misleading shadow of what counts.