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Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers. Because strategy is abstract, employees often mentally replace it with the hard metrics meant to assess whether the organization is succeeding at it. This tendency is called surrogation, and it destroys a lot of value. Take Wells Fargo. Executives there decided to track cross-sales to customers to measure performance on the bank's strategy of building long-term customer relationships. The focus on cross-selling goals led employees to open 3.5 million accounts without customer consent, which, with brutal irony, severely damaged the long-term relationships the bank sought. Though it's easy to fall into the surrogation snare, firms can take steps to avoid it. For instance, they can involve the people who'll implement a strategy in its formulation, so they'll be more likely to grasp it and less likely to replace it with a metric. Tying financial incentives to a metric is usually a mistake: It only increases the focus on the numbers. Using multiple yardsticks is very helpful, however; that highlights the fact that no single metric captures the strategy and makes people less apt to surrogate.

Andy Carr, the founder of a small consulting firm that specializes in telephone call-centers, is completing an analysis of call center operations for Lion Financial Services (LFS). LFS operates three call centers that collectively employ 170 agents and handle 30,000 calls per week. Agents are organized into different "pools," according to their training and experience; complicated rules are used for routing calls among the three centers and their constituent pools. Carr's analysis and recommendations touch upon a variety of issues: capacity requirements, including the mix of agents by skill category; training programs, promotion ladders, and the definition of agent pools; call routing protocols; potential benefits of physical consolidation; and most prominently, the degree of call "scripting" that is appropriate in designing the LFS work system. Carr believes that by developing a small number of "call blueprints," training agents in their use, and measuring adherence to the blueprints in call-monitoring programs, LFS can improve the quality of service it delivers and reduce the experience and educational levels required of its call-center agents. Concerns are raised about the creation of a factorylike atmosphere.