When a useful metric like "average handling time" becomes a performance target, employees game the system. Reps may hang up on customers to meet quotas, destroying the metric's ability to reflect actual customer satisfaction.

When leaders enforce memorizing every metric without a connecting narrative, teams resort to cherry-picking data to fit a story. This creates an illusion of data-drivenness while masking a lack of true strategic understanding and encouraging superficial analysis.

A destructive blind spot for driven leaders is "goal-induced blindness," an obsession with measurable goals that obscures other crucial factors like ethics, health, and relationships. This can lead to personal burnout and corporate scandals like the Volkswagen emissions case.

Despite posters championing collaboration, a company's real priorities are revealed through promotion decisions. When individuals who manipulate metrics or undermine teams are advanced, it proves those behaviors are what the organization actually rewards, rendering official values meaningless.

The excuse that "it's the people, not the framework" is a dangerous platitude. The system doesn't need to hire evil people; it just needs good people operating within a system of bad incentives. Unchecked, outcome-driven goals can compel anyone to make poor ethical choices.

As Charlie Munger taught, incentive-caused bias is powerful because it causes people to rationalize actions they might otherwise find unethical. When compensation depends on a certain behavior, the human brain twists reality to justify that behavior, as seen in the Wells Fargo fake accounts scandal.

Setting rigid targets incentivizes employees to present favorable numbers, even subconsciously. This "performance theater" discourages them from investigating negative results, which are often the source of valuable learning. The muscle for detective work atrophies, and real problems remain hidden beneath good-looking metrics.

Intense pressure to hit goals corrupts data-driven cultures. Teams may block improvements to A/B testing tools if accurate results threaten a 'win'. This pathology extends to shipping features solely to meet a deadline, with a plan to delete the code immediately after the performance review cycle ends.

Alan Chang argues that incentivizing metrics can have negative second-order effects. For example, a recruiter bonused on 'hires per month' may be motivated to convince hiring managers to lower the talent bar just to hit their target, which is detrimental to the company's long-term goals.