Flow Of Time

You get what you measure

This is unconfirmed but the source was quite a reliable.

A few years back management of Ericsson changed their bonus structure from the option scheme to something more appealing and realistic - to cash flow basis. This was a few years back when Ericsson was really down and the stock options were naturally worthless.

The shareholder meeting accepted the change of the scheme for cash flow based system. Guess what happened quite a soon afterwards? Ericsson announced the sale of their London HQ's property. It had very nice cash flow impact and the management got their hefty bonuses. Needless to say that the business side of the company was still making losses and the sale was just an extraordinary one-time sale which should not have been taken into account even in the cash flow metrics. Well, never mind the details. Cash flow is king!