Last week I confidently cited Mark Twain on history’s tendency to rhyme. The line felt perfect. Short and profound, very Twain.
One problem: he never said it.
The quote appeared in 1970, sixty years after his death.
The irony? The misquote captured the truth better than Twain’s actual words.
Take the business world’s favorite line:
“What gets measured gets managed.”
Peter Drucker said that, right?
No!
The phrase comes from journalist Simon Caulkin, who was summarizing a 1956 research paper by organizational researcher V.F. Ridgway. Ridgway’s paper warned that obsessing over metrics could mess up how organizations actually work.
The full quote (which nobody remembers) is:
“What gets measured gets managed, even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organization.”
We kept the catchy part, threw out the warning, and stuck a famous name on it. A caution against metric fixation became its biggest cheerleader.
Same thing happens with investment advice. We remember the catchy version, forget the caveats.
Misquotes survive because they hold truths, even when the attribution is fiction. History does rhyme across cycles. Metrics do drive behavior. They’re wrong on attribution but right on insight. That’s why we keep using them despite knowing better.
💬 What misquote are you still using anyway?
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