Wells Fargo Opened a Couple Million Fake Accounts

Two basic principles of management, and regulation, and life, are: You get what you measure.
The thing that you measure will get gamed. Really that’s just one principle: You get what you measure, but only exactly what you measure. There’s no guarantee that you’ll get the more general good thing that you thought you were approximately measuring. If you want hard workers and measure hours worked, you’ll get a lot of workers surfing the internet until midnight. If you want low banking bonuses and measure bonus-to-base-salary ratios, you’ll get high base salaries. Measurement is sort of an evil genie: It grants your wishes, but it takes them just a bit too literally.