What gets paid gets done, whatever people believe; an unmeasured cause loses to a measured output, so measure the cause itself.

The claim

What an organisation measures and pays for becomes what its people do, whatever they believe, so a cause that is not measured loses to an output that is. Organisations count the what precisely, usually money, and the why barely at all, which is why drift away from a cause does not show on any dashboard. The remedy offered is a measure that moves only when the cause is served: a debt-collection firm that paid bonuses on thank-you notes its agents sent to debtors rather than on money collected, and a builder who dropped anyone who stayed past the clock-out window from the bonus pool. The reported results (collections far above the industry average, high productivity, low turnover) are single cases told by the author, with no counterfactual examined; the mechanism, that incentives override the values of the people inside them, has wide support well beyond this book.