A number set in a boardroom and the same number received at a branch counter are not the same object. At the top it is an aspiration, picked from a range, revisable next quarter, attached to no personal consequence worth naming. Eight levels down it arrives as a condition of employment, with a daily tally, a manager also being graded on it, and no standing to say the target was wrong. Leaders calibrate ambition from the altitude where it costs least, then read compliance back as evidence the level was right. The tell is not that people miss the number. It is that they stop missing it.

Wells Fargo's cross-selling goal was eight products per household — “Going for Gr-eight,” as the internal slogan had it, picked partly because it rhymed. Retail bankers who could not reach it legitimately reached it anyway, opening deposit and credit-card accounts customers had never asked for, at times funding them with those customers' own money. In September 2016 the bank settled with the CFPB, the OCC and the Los Angeles City Attorney for $185 million, and disclosed that roughly 5,300 employees had been dismissed over about five years for improper sales practices. The count of unauthorised accounts started near two million and rose to roughly three and a half million on a later review. John Stumpf left the following month. The Federal Reserve capped the bank's total assets in 2018, and the cap stayed for years.

The 5,300 dismissals are the part worth sitting with. An organisation that fires that many people for the same behaviour over five years has been receiving an unambiguous signal about its target and filing it as a personnel problem. The goal itself never appears in the incident reports, because goals do not appear in incident reports. What a leader controls is not the number but the distance between where it is set and where it is felt — and nobody whose job depends on the answer can tell you that distance has grown too large.