A recent email to a "colleague" (well more a boss...) called attention to a problem of using an arithmetic mean rather than a geometric mean in a metric of performance that was extremely Poisson distributed. The response was essentially 'well, you're absolutely correct but since people use this to apply for promotion we wanted to use an aspirational mean.' I kid you not! An academic said the equivalent of "Yes, we know it's wrong but it suits our management goals so we're doing it anyway."
Can you guess in how many ways I find this offensive? Let me suggest the following:
not honest
manipulative
mathematically wrong
disingenuous
I'm sure there are more but it's too depressing to dwell on.
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