"What Gets Measured Gets Managed": How Benchmarking Improves Pension Management

“If you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”

Peter Drucker

“What gets measured gets improved.”

Peter Drucker

“The Global Pension Index is based on the weighted average of the sub-indexes of Adequacy, Sustainability, and Integrity. The combined score indicates the overall quality of a country’s retirement income system. Eight systems have improved their Index grade this year, and no systems have been  downgraded. This shows that retirement income provision is improving at a global scale….a critically important outcome as people live longer and birthrates continue to decline.”

2025 Mercer CFA Global Pension Index

Exploring a Drucker Verity

The Oxford dictionary defines ‘verity’ as a “true principle or belief, especially one of fundamental importance”. By that definition, ‘what gets measured get managed’ surely qualifies as a verity, usually attributed to management philosopher Peter Drucker. Ironically, there is controversy as to whether he  ever uttered those exact words, as he did the two close facsimiles cited above. We note below that quite independently, Drucker would also play an important role in the evolution of pension design and management principles through his 1976 book “The Unseen Revolution”. For example, these principles were clearly reflected in the 1988 Ontario Government-commissioned study titled “In Whose Interest?”, which led to the creation of Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan in 1991, and eventually the creation of the  renowned high-performance Canadian Pension Model in the late 1990s and beyond. Our article in the April 2021 issue of the Journal of Portfolio Management tells the evolution story in considerable detail.