Every day, at almost every company, strategy is being hijacked by numbers. Because strategy is abstract, employees often mentally replace it with the hard metrics meant to assess whether the organization is succeeding at it. This tendency is called surrogation, and it destroys a lot of value. Take Wells Fargo. Executives there decided to track cross-sales to customers to measure performance on the bank’s strategy of building long-term customer relationships. The focus on cross-selling goals led employees to open 3.5 million accounts without customer consent, which, with brutal irony, severely damaged the long-term relationships the bank sought.