Given a choice between two metrics, managers will usually choose the most gameable, indirect, activity-oriented metric, even if it is far less useful for driving results.
And I can’t blame them. That’s the game. They have to make a number go up, their boss also has numbers that need to go up, and so on. In the worst cases, everyone is complicit in creating a forest of bullshit numbers that went up even while the company tanked.
Given a choice between two metrics, managers will usually choose the most gameable, indirect, activity-oriented metric, even if it is far less useful for driving results.
And I can’t blame them. That’s the game. They have to make a number go up, their boss also has numbers that need to go up, and so on. In the worst cases, everyone is complicit in creating a forest of bullshit numbers that went up even while the company tanked.