Metrics become political when the person being measured can choose the definition of success.
The argument.
Organizations often treat KPIs as objective facts. In practice, metrics are selected inside incentive systems. A department will naturally prefer measures it can influence, measures that move quickly, and measures that make its own contribution legible.
That is how impressions displace incremental profit, conversion rate ignores discounting, ROAS ignores contribution, and revenue growth ignores working capital. None of those metrics is inherently useless. They become dangerous when a local proxy is promoted into a statement about the whole business.
A useful operating metric must reconcile to the economic objective and survive changes in presentation. If the company says it is maximizing profit, the chain from campaign or channel KPI to contribution and cash should be inspectable.
The cure for measurement theatre is not more dashboards. It is fewer definitions, a common truth source and explicit ownership of the economic outcome.
Return to the Economics Office index, or read Fourth Derivative in the Free Public Library.