A brief detour into abstraction may help illuminate why performance measures are often unsatisfactory and why performance measurement often proves frustrating, especially in large and complicated firms. Outside of the realm of business and economics, performance is what people and machines do: it is their functioning and accomplishments. This is codified in the dictionary. For example, The Oxford English Dictionary defines performance as:

In other words, performance resides in the present (in the act of performing or functioning) or the past (in the form of accomplishments) and can therefore, at least in principle, be observed and measured. Performance is not in the future. To repeat the phrase I have italicized, performance is often “ … antithetical to promise.”

Economic performance, by contrast, involves an element of anticipation if not promise.