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SBP 177: The Sharp Cut - The Incentives Trap: When Metrics Become Targets [Part 1]
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In 2004, Wells Fargo’s internal audit flagged a problem: employees felt they couldn’t hit sales targets without gaming the system.
The scandal broke 12 years later.
Two million fake accounts.
Thousands fired.
Billions in fines.
No one set out to commit fraud.
They optimized for the metric.
In this Sharp Cut, we break down Goodhart’s Law — when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure — and show how the same pattern is operating inside marketing departments right now.
We examine:
Why CTR has near-zero correlation with brand growth (Nielsen, LinkedIn…
The skinny
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