So now you know the Cobra effect!
If you want a revision then you can click on this link!
https://ramadocblog.com/2026/09/04/cobra-effect/
Then again if you thought that the cobra effect, AFFECTS only government agencies and rats and cobras well you are in for a shock!
There are many well documented incidents but two stand out for their sheer incredulous nature!
The first was the target achievement drive and you can actually find the examples of this all over the corporate work!
This one is known as the Wells Fargo Fake Account incident!
The very INTELLIGENTManagement at Wells Fargo set incredibly high daily sales quotas, pushing employees to cross-sell financial products to existing customers!
So far so good! But the reaction was actually bad!
Now because employees faced intense pressure and risked losing their jobs, they began opening millions of unauthorized bank and credit card accounts without customer consent!
This resuted in Massive regulatory fines, moreover it destroyed customer trust which lead to severe reputational damage!
The company took a long time to recover from this COBRA effect!
Then you have the common scenarious which you see in software company!
Known as the Software Bug Bounty! In this incident, a tech company wanted to improve the security of its code, so management offered developers a cash bonus for every software bug they identified and fixed!
That is a big mistake!
What happened was that the developers secretly created software bugs in their own code, checked them into the repository, and then immediately “discovered” and fixed them to cash in on the bonus!
Ingenious! The more BUGS you FIND (read CREATE!); the more money you get!
The end result was that the overall code quality dropped, and project timelines slowed down! Of course the INCENTIVE was dropped in the recycle bin without any chance of restore!
The lesson is that you cannot incentivise a mistake or problem or else people will create more problems to get incentive!
Hope that taught you something! Then again if you are willing to learn especially on Teacher’s day then even a child can teach you a lot!
All you have to be is a student for life!
SHubh ratri!
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