That quote mostly applies to human organizations where the connection between outcome and metric is questionable. Or where incentives unexpectedly change behavior.

If your goal is fast software it can be measured quantively and you’re likely to improve the actual thing using those metrics.

The goal above was to write fast software. The developers made the mistake of seeing that they had saturated all the cores as "We did a good job of using the entire machine" = "our code is fast". They had a measurement and misinterpreted what it meant.