#828 Numbers Gone Wild: The Hidden Cost of Being Data-Driven
Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle
Dan Andrews; Ian Schoen
4.9 • 527 Ratings
🗓️ 9 October 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Chasing numbers can actually destroy what made your business great. In this episode, Dan and Ian unpack Goodhart’s Law — the idea that once a measure becomes a target, it stops being useful — and how founders accidentally turn smart goals into bad incentives. Plus, you’ll hear six ways to build healthier systems, lead better, and stop metrics from running your company off the rails.
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CHAPTERS
(00:01:16) The Hair-Dye Economy & Durable Businesses
(00:03:38) The Problem with Metrics
(00:07:44) Fix #1: Revisit Your Brand Promise
(00:09:12) Fix #2: Determine a Countervailing Metric
(00:12:17) Fix #3: Combine Input and Output Metrics
(00:13:12) Fix #4: Refresh Metrics Every 90 Days
(00:14:39) Fix #5: Pulse Discipline
(00:16:05) Fix #6: The Leadership Lens
(00:20:00) The Alt Business School
(00:25:42) When a Job Post Becomes a Marketing Hack
CONNECT:
Dan@tropicalmba.com
Ian@tropicalmba.com
Past guests on TMBA include Cal Newport, David Heinemeier Hannson, Seth Godin, Ricardo Semler, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling, Jay Clouse, Einar Vollset, Sam Dogan, Gino Wickam, James Clear, Jodie Cook, Mark Webster, Steph Smith, Taylor Pearson, Justin Tan, Matt Gartland, Ayman Al-Abdullah, Lucy Bella.
PLAYLIST:
Wealth Without a 7-Figure Exit: 5 Steps
How to Instantly Improve Your Lead Pipeline by 20-50%
Growth vs. Optimization — 90% of Growth Comes from 10% of Activities?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | These are systems. These are toolkits. |
| 0:02.5 | It's like we're not ever going to have an input metric that isn't associated with an output metric. |
| 0:07.8 | And then we're going to take a look at the correlation and we're going to try and figure out where the problems are. Hey, hey, hey. |
| 0:28.2 | Hey, real quick at the top here, I've got a quick ask. |
| 0:33.2 | We've put a short listener survey to keep the show interesting and useful for you. |
| 0:34.1 | It's built with AI. |
| 0:35.5 | It just takes a few minutes. |
| 0:38.3 | And we're going to read every single reply. |
| 0:44.1 | We appreciate your feedback, what you want us to cover, positives, negatives, places we can take the show in a better direction. |
| 0:45.4 | We really appreciate it. |
| 0:46.6 | Check it out in the show notes. |
| 0:55.2 | Welcome back to the Tropical NBA podcast, everybody, where we help you build a business online and hopefully getting more time, |
| 1:01.8 | flexibility, location freedom, and building wealth in the process. To join me, we've got somebody who's done it, the boss man. Welcome to the program. Yo, it's been a little while |
| 1:08.0 | since we've talked. Been better. Let me say that. |
| 1:15.2 | Found some disturbing news this weekend that I figured I'd share with you and the listeners of this show. |
| 1:19.0 | At a dinner party, not too many of us there, okay? |
| 1:23.7 | But of the men at this dinner party, and they're men and women, of the men at this dinner party, |
| 1:27.4 | what percentage would you say dyed their hair and their beard? Well, based on the |
| 1:29.2 | setup, I'm going to guess that it's a very high percentage and that we don't know about this |
| 1:33.1 | emerging marketplace. Correct. So found out that a large percentage of the people at this party |
| 1:39.0 | in their 40s and 50s had been dyeing their facial hair and their hair on a regular basis. |
| 1:45.2 | I sit there thinking for the last, I don't know, I've known these people for a while, |
... |
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