Behavior Reveals Purpose

Sears had a vision. One company, unified mission, customer-centric culture.

Eddie Lampert had a better idea.

2005. He restructured Sears into 30 separate business units. Each with its own president, board, and P&L. Units would buy and sell services from each other through competitive bidding.

Internal competition would drive performance. Everyone optimizing their own unit would optimize the whole.

They said collaboration. The system said competition.

What happened?

Units hoarded resources. Refused to share customer data. Fought over budgets. One executive called it "warring tribes."

The apparel division wouldn't share insights with tools. IT charged other divisions premium rates for basic services. Marketing optimized their P&L, not company revenue.

Sears filed for bankruptcy in 2018.

Not because the vision was wrong.

Because the system optimized for what it actually rewarded.

The mechanism: Daily operations encode the real purpose. What gets measured, tracked, and rewarded every day, that's what the system optimizes for.

Not the vision statement. Not the stated values.

Lampert's system measured unit profit. So units optimized unit profit.

The company died while every unit hit their numbers.

Your company says "customer first" but promotes based on internal politics? The system optimizes for politics.

Your diet plan says healthy eating but your actual loop is stress → comfort food → guilt? The system optimizes for emotional regulation, not nutrition.

If you watch what your system produces reliably, not what it promises but what is it actually optimized for...

The feedback loops you run every day reveal the truth.

Promotion criteria. Budget allocation. What gets celebrated in meetings. What actually gets someone fired.

That's your system's purpose.

Everything else is fiction.

What if you redesigned the loops to match the purpose you claim?