Numbers people usually beat visionaries because a spreadsheet looks like a fact. “Efficiency” often means moving work to customers, to another department, or to next year - credit concentrated, damage dispersed. If you define a role as its most visible task, you will fire the doorman and keep the hinge. If you define marketing as leads, you will get leads and lose the right to charge. Whatever you measure, you teach. Founders and families can look foolish for a few quarters and own the decade; listed firms that must win every 90 days often win them on the way down.

You have probably noticed the pattern. The companies that can afford to look slightly stupid for a few quarters are often still run by a founder, or still held by a family. The companies that must look brilliant every 90 days are often public and busy.

Goodhart’s Law, in the form boards can use: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.

The cynical position of the numbers people is that marketing is the department that buys ads and delivers leads.

Before you measure, you define. And most companies define like a drunk with a highlighter: they mark the one task they can see, then file everything else as waste.

SATIRE. NOT CAREER ADVICE. NOT A HOW-TO. NOT AN INVITATION.

Think of the following as a satirical guide on how to slowly ruin a business. If an executive actually implements this, they aren’t ‘efficient’ - they are the reason your Net Promoter Score (that critical measure of customer loyalty)is a disaster. This is corporate comedy, but the real joke is how uncomfortably familiar it might sound to your own operations.

The most dangerous slide in the board pack is the one that says “we saved money” and stops talking.

In the executive meeting, the person with the spreadsheet wins. Not because they are wiser. Because they arrived with something that looks like a fact.

There’s a meaningful difference between asking a chatbot to draft something for you and using it to create something with you.

AI may make legal organisations faster while quietly making them more similar.

The threat isn’t that AI will take the legal function’s job. It’s that it may train the legal function to stop doing the part of the job that cannot be delegated: thinking.

Your legal team’s AI-assisted output is starting to all sound the same—and research explains why.