As leaders, we understand that intangibles are important, but we don’t have a clue how to measure them.

Conley is pointing to a persistent leadership dilemma: many of the factors that most strongly shape organizational performance—culture, trust, purpose, morale, belonging, and meaning—are “intangibles” that resist straightforward quantification. Leaders may acknowledge their importance, yet default to managing what is easily counted (revenue, occupancy, productivity) because measurement systems and incentives are built around hard metrics. The quote critiques this imbalance and implies that better leadership requires developing proxies, narratives, and qualitative/quantitative hybrids to track human and cultural realities. It also hints at humility: admitting measurement limits is the first step toward more thoughtful, less purely numerical management.