Dear Leaders,

In the waning days of the British Raj, Delhi had a cobra problem.

Venomous snakes were everywhere. The colonial government, staffed by men trained at the finest institutions in Britain, devised a perfectly rational solution: a cash bounty for every dead cobra.

The program was a smashing success. Dead cobras piled up by the thousands. The data looked excellent.The bureaucrats congratulated themselves.

Then they noticed the cobra population wasn’t declining. It was growing.

Why? Because enterprising locals had realized that breeding cobras was more profitable than hunting them. They were running cobra farms,harvesting the bounty.

When the government discovered this and cancelled the program, the breeders released their now-worthless snakes into the streets.

Delhi ended up with more cobras than when they started.

Half a century later, Robert McNamara would make the exact same mistake. Except this time, it would cost 58,000 American lives.

McNamara was brilliant. Harvard Whiz Kid. First Ford Motor Company president outside the Ford family. Secretary of Defenseunder Kennedy and Johnson.

McNamara was a man of data. He believed that with enough metrics, he could solve any problem.When he took over the Vietnam War effort, he demanded measurements. He wanted to know if the U.S. was winning.

But how do you measure “winning” in a guerrilla war? You can’t measure territory, there are no front lines. You can’t measure morale.

So McNamara chose the one thing he could measure: Body Count.

If enemy deaths exceeded American deaths, we were winning. Simple. Quantifiable. Trackable.

The data looked fantastic. Charts went up and to the right. On paper, the U.S. was dominating.

Except the data was a lie.

Field commanders, knowing their performance was judged by body count, started inflating numbers. Civilian deaths were reclassified as enemy casualties. Artillery would blast empty jungle, and commanders would report “estimated kills.”

The metric became the mission. We weren’t trying to win the war. We were trying to win the spreadsheet.

We lost both.

There’s a pattern here. It has a name: Goodhart’s Law.

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.”

The moment you decide to manage to a metric, you create a game. And your people: rational, intelligent, career-mindedpeople, will play the game you designed, not the game you intended.

The British didn’t want cobra farms. McNamara didn’t want inflated body counts. But both created systems that rewarded exactly that behavior.

Where are you doing the same?

Here’s what makes this so dangerous: the metrics don’t just fail to capture reality. They actively distortit.

The act of measurement changes what you’re measuring. It’s the Heisenberg Principle for business.

– We start measuring sales calls, and salespeople optimize for call volume, not relationship building.

– We start measuring code commits, and engineers optimize for commits, not architecture.

– We start measuring patient throughput, and doctors optimize for speed, not care.

The metric becomes a substitute for judgment. And once that happens, we’re not managing the business anymore. We’re managing a dashboard that’s increasingly disconnected from reality.

There’s an old joke about a drunk man searching for his keys under a streetlight.

A police officer asks: “Did you drop them here?” “No,” the man says, pointing into the darkness. “I dropped them over there. But the light is better here.”

In business, we do this every day. We suffer from the Streetlight Effect: we look where the light is, not where the truth is.

Daniel Yankelovich mapped out how this kills companies:

– Measure what’s easy to measure.

– Disregard what’s hard to measure.

– Presume what can’t be measured isn’t important.

– Claim what can’t be measured doesn’t exist.

Step four is corporate suicide.

We can’t avoid metrics. But we can stop being naiveabout them.

The answer is never to measure a quantity without measuring its counterweight. You need Paired Metrics.

Speed must be paired with quality. Volume must be paired with retention. Revenue must be paired with margin and customer health.

Here’s how to audit your metrics:

For each KPI, complete this sentence: “If someone maximized this metric while ignoring everything else, they would…”

If that sentence ends with anything other than “create enormous value for the business,” you’re breeding cobras.

I’m not calling your employees sociopaths. I’m acknowledging that rational actors will find the most efficient path to their incentive, regardless of collateral damage.

So here’s what to ask yourself:

– Which of your core metricscould someone game while destroying the business?

– What are you measuringthat’s actively distorting behavior?

– What are the most important things in your business that don’t show up in any dashboard?

Some of the most valuable assets in your company are invisible. Trust. Brand equity. Culture. Momentum.

You can’t measure them. You must feel them.

This is why you are paid the big bucks. If leadership was just reading a dashboard, we could replace you with technology.

But leadership is, and always has been, the ability to navigate the dark matter: to make decisions based on intuition, texture, and nuance despitewhat the data might say.

So, the next time someone quotes the infamous, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,”correct them.

“If you can’t measure it, you have to lead it.”

Onward,

Hamza