Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo employees opened roughly 3.5 million bank and credit card accounts customers never asked for. They weren't a ring of rogue actors; they were responding to the incentive system the company built. For years the bank ran an aggressive cross-selling push, eight products per customer, daily branch quotas, relentless pressure rolling downhill from managers. People under that kind of strain did what people often do: they found ways to make the numbers. When the fraud surfaced in 2016, the initial fine was survivable. The hearings, the testimony, and the firings of the people the system had cornered were not.

For founders and operators, this is a case about the gap between what you measure and what you actually want. It sharpens the decision of how to stress-test a metric before you roll it out, by imagining the worst behavior it could reward, because someone will eventually find that behavior. What a countervailing check looks like in practice is the move the case saves for the end.