At a lot of companies, first the winners and losers are selected, then the metric procedures and goals are defined to document the pre-selected outcome. Manage

At a lot of companies, first the winners and losers are selected, then the metric procedures and goals are defined to document the pre-selected outcome. Manager A spends 20 minutes finding memes and obviously is the better manager because he met the expected pre-defined goal result while also having 20 minutes left over to meme-search and at a personal level is better because the report was more entertaining, so Mgr A gets promoted. Mgr B sees that, understands his spot in the hierarchy was baked into the cake before the metrics and goals were even defined so there's no point working harder on the supposed real job, and if memes worked for Mgr A, he may as well spend 200 minutes meme-searching, and if he doesn't get promoted he should meme-search for 400 minutes next time... There is usually a compressive effect where if everyone in the industry is un or under employed unless they're in the top 5%, then only the top people are employed and there's not much "spread" to rank results on anyway. How many companies only hire "top ivy CS grads" or "rockstar ninjas", for example? I'm just saying a bell curve matches reality and enables usable predictions if you're looking at a sample of the height of the entire US Federal Census, but its meaningless if your sample is NBA championship winners. You can't cargo cult 80s era Jack Welch style rank -n- yank the B and C level players if it would be a CYA HR firing offense to have ever hired a non A level player. That's what supply and demand mismatch does to a system. The entire concept of competitive metric result reporting is obsolete.