[mirko22]

It comes down to what kind of people are in the positions. If they are kind of people that only care about numbers not amount of metrics will change that, if they are strong leaders with vision they usually have their custom ways of dealing with metrics.

[pm90]

I think the author of the article is trying to illustrate that the result of even a few metric-cheaters is that over time the entire organization or field is dominated by the metric-cheaters. There is just no way to always keep such people out of your organization once you cross a certain size threshold. So the logical result is that with time, everyone is forced to become more like the metric cheaters just to survive so they either leave or become metric cheaters themselves; in either case the product goes to shit as the creative problem solvers leave.