...my response was to the interview question was,

Years back I had a mentor, a leader in the organization I worked in that would state " Never change your external actions just meet an internal metric" and that statement has guided me through some challenging questions and options. Our actions need to, and should be changed and that is accepted, but see, where he was coming from was a place of real change and growth at a foundational level. By reporting as accurately possible, instead of just making the books look good, or "making the numbers" we could get to the real reason a particular process needed to be changed. Who among us has ever been working on a project or task, and realize the data is skewed or just wrong. When reporting accurately within an organization there just might be some fallout. However, if that happened, where you work, it probably needed to happen.

Management often means well but is disconnected with the average worker. This disconnect is apparent across most industries today as has been the last 50 years. I believe they know there is a disconnect, hence the need to have gatherings and town hall meetings in one way or another, in an attempt to connect and really know the workers. A high percentage of middle managers wouldn't know what to do with their employees reporting accurately, it would just break the system and they are not prepared for such a disruption, because hey, they are not necessarily reporting accurately either.

Let's just think about the benefits of reporting accurately even when there could be some tough conversations that arise out of it.

1. Management could find out that their scheduling hours for workers aren't a good fit.

2. It could be realized that a standard rule in place excludes the most productive people on a team.

3. They could realize that they have been using the wrong piece of software for a task that they've paid many times over for poor support.

4. They could realize that the parking rules or commute rules actually work against them.

There is a current situation I'm familiar with where the company tells their team members to "Stay Productive". Obviously it is important for each member of the team to be productive and there is no flaw in this request. The problem comes in with the description of what is classified as "Being Productive" There are currently over a dozen task's that are not deemed to be productive task's but are required to do. Most of these that fall under the non-productive title, directly contribute to the bottom line of the business. These tasks, if not done will have repercussions from both the customer and the company. I can't think of a single employee that would turn their daily time in and actually list part of it as "non-productive" especially when we are graded on such.

"a good shareholder experience should be a byproduct of a good product or service"

I want to encourage each of you in your daily work life to report as accurately as possible, but with a caveat: Have a discussion with that supervisor about their thought on reporting accurately given the bottom line that they are entrusted to protect and grow.

The following idea always seems to surface after a conversation like in the above. The shareholder is important, but a good shareholder experience should be a byproduct of a good product or service. It was that way in the beginning. People would invest because of a company's performance and a few other possible factors.

Why can't we just be better to our customers, make an awesome widget, provide an exceptional service second to none!

...the stockholders should follow..right?

Let's be truthful

So you pick up your phone? You're scrolling through news stories. You click on a title that seems interesting to you and after reading a couple of sentences or maybe even a paragraph, it becomes evident, there's really nothing here of any value, (known as a nothing burger) where you could have lived the rest of your life or at least the next 10 minutes, and had you never started reading this bread sandwich, you would have been better off to just stay within your own thoughts contemplating your next move in life, reviewing the previous days missed opportunities or why do I like red cars.

This present business model in journalism of quantity over quality really does no one any good. Just think of how the content creators must feel at the end of the day, knowing they spent a whole day on an article just to make a quota, knowing it's not heartfelt, and now they have to change the title to something that sounds interesting enough to click and read; we have clickbait

Anyway, should you actually make it to the end of your article, you will see the infectious advertisements riddled with viruses (still weird how use medical terms to describe computer issues in 2022) but who would really click on these.

The point is we all continue to do this and after an hour of, ya-know catching up on the day, we put the phone down and realize I just wasted an hour on the excepted journalism of today that has plagued the modern mobile scene.

I think in Google's news feed there should several 1-10 rating star bars. Like Well written, Value received, Humorous content, Meaningful content, and Comments. Bored Panda is getting the comments thing right (well it's mostly comments) Perhaps one of the most important rating star bars is what Google tries to do with algorithm (title re-write) this has been needed for quite some time, and is designed to eliminate or at least cut back on click-bait titles.

If the netizens could simply vote an article up or down like Medium does, we could free up billions of un-purposeful pixels arranged to steal our time, and possibly even save a digital tree.