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In organizations, once you articulate how success will be measured, everybody tries to game the system so that they are measured in the best possible way.
Clayton M. Christensen
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Interpretation

What this quote means

Success metrics often lead people to manipulate their actions to meet those criteria.

Clayton M. Christensen highlights the tendency of individuals within organizations to focus on meeting success metrics, sometimes at the expense of genuine performance or ethical standards. When success is measured by specific metrics, employees may prioritize those goals over broader objectives, leading to a culture of manipulation rather than true achievement.

Themes

SuccessMetricsManipulationPerformanceOrganizations

In practice

Example use cases

During a corporate training session to discuss the impact of performance metrics.

More from Clayton M. Christensen

There is no single right answer or path forward, but there is one right way to frame the problem.
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Understanding motivation is one of the most important things we can do in our lives, because it has such a bearing on why we do the things we do and whether we enjoy them or not.
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Companies, in fact, are specifically organized to under-invest in disruptive innovations! This is one reason why we often suggest that companies set up separate teams or groups to commercialize disruptive innovations. When disruptive innovations have to fight with other innovations for resources, they tend to lose out.
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There is no evidence that success in business will make us happy people or allow us to have happy families.
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By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body.
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The breakthrough innovations come when the tension is greatest and the resources are most limited. That's when people are actually a lot more open to rethinking the fundamental way they do business.
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