You feel it before you can name it. A meeting that rewards the wrong behavior. A policy that punishes the right one. A quarter that hit the number and still felt like a loss.
Start with the body, not the chart. Walk into almost any modern institution — a hospital, a newsroom, a school board, a boardroom — and within minutes you can sense the uneasiness. People are working hard at the wrong thing and they know it. The good ones leave. The honest ones go quiet. The rest learn to perform the metric.
This book gives that feeling a name. Goodhart, Campbell, the Cobra Effect — these are not academic curiosities. They are the diagnostic language for what your gut already registered.
Once you have the language, you cannot unsee the architecture. Every system that disappoints you is producing exactly what it is paid to produce. The question this book answers is what to do about it.
Trust the unease. It is data. Name the incentive it is pointing at.