Hi Reader,
You can look like the hardest-working person in the building and produce nothing at all. This year, some of the biggest companies in the world spent billions of dollars learning that the hard way.
It started as a contest. They decided that using artificial intelligence more meant working more, so they put AI usage on leaderboards and ranked their people by it. They called it token-maxxing. And their people did what people always do when a number becomes the prize.
They gamed it. They ran bots on pointless tasks. They padded simple questions with entire files.
They burned the number because someone was watching the number. Uber went through a full year of budget in four months, and its own Chief Operating Officer admitted he could not point to one new thing the customer had received for it.
I watched this exact mistake years ago, on my own sales floor, and it cost me nothing to catch.
The effort target was 150 minutes of talk time a day, up on a board for everyone to see. One day my Sales Director flagged a man whose talk time was well over the floor and whose business was zero. Not one deal. We did not argue about it. We checked the recordings. He was calling corporate switchboards and jumping extensions just to keep the clock running, sitting on hold and listening to the music for fifteen minutes at a time, all to fake the effort. He was not working. He was feeding the number. The data showed it the moment we looked.
The difference was never the metric. Talk time and tokens are the same kind of thing. Both are effort, and effort on its own can always be faked. The difference is that I was watching two lines and they were watching one.
Any single number is a number you can game. Measure only the result and people sandbag and hide inside a safe band. Measure only the effort and people fake the motion. A fake can always hide behind one number. What it cannot do is hide in the gap between two. Effort over the floor and business at zero is a gap that explains itself.
Someone will say this is easy in sales, where the result is a signed deal. What about operations, where nobody hands you revenue? The rule still holds. You only look in a different place. In sales the customer is outside the building and pays in money. In operations the customer is inside the building, the next desk, the client on the day, and they pay in “it worked” or “it did not.” Either way there is a customer, and the customer is the result.
So here is the whole thing in one line. Measure the stroke and watch the shore at the same time. Watch only the stroke and the fake walks straight through. Watch only the shore and you find out too late. Watch both, and there is nowhere left to hide. An actor can splash all day. He does not get one inch closer to the shore.
The giants paid for that lesson with a quarter of their budget. You can have it for the price of reading this.
Name the results. TAME the effort.
BJay
See you next week!
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