Several years ago I was told, mid-year, not to worry too much about a target we were clearly going to miss.

Then the performance reviews came in. Just the number, and the gap.

That experience reinforces something called Goodhart's Law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. And the more I've thought about it, the more I've seen it play out everywhere: from nail factories to Pfizer boardrooms to quarterly earnings calls where executives admit they'd kill a profitable project rather than miss a number.

Hitting your targets feels like winning. But sometimes it's the most expensive thing you can do.

This week I'm writing about the hidden cost of how we measure success — and what to do about it.

I spent years building and running a loyalty program.

Points structures. Redemption catalogues. Breakage calculations. Vendor relationships. System integrations. It was complex, creative, and genuinely one of my favourite stretches of my career.

But the whole time, there was a question I couldn't quite get away from: are loyalty programs solving the right problem? Or are they a workaround for something more fundamental?

Then I found an honest mechanic. And he answered it for me.

This week's post is about the loyalty program that costs nothing, and generates more word-of-mouth than any structured program I've ever seen.