Twelve appointments a day

A woman who runs a small salon in Muscat sets herself a target: twelve appointments a day.

It is a clean number. It fits on a sticky note by the till, and every evening she knows whether she won or lost.

So the bookings tighten. Forty-five minutes becomes thirty-five. The tea and conversation at the end disappear. The new stylist, still learning, is put on the busiest hours because every chair has to be full. The number goes up.

A few months later the regulars are thinner on the ground, and new customers rarely come back a second time. Twelve a day is still being reached, mostly by discounting the quiet mornings.

She was maximising. Pick one goal, push it as high as it will go, and ignore what it costs everywhere else. It is satisfying work, because the scoreboard is simple and the progress shows.

The alternative is harder and less satisfying. Optimising means holding several things at once: enough bookings to pay the rent, enough time to do each one well, staff who are growing rather than drowning, customers who leave wanting to return. No single setting wins on all of them. The job is to find the best balance among them, and to keep finding it as things change.

Nobody can write that on a sticky note. That is exactly why so many businesses, small and very large, choose one number and chase it until it starts eating the rest of the business.

The single number is easy to measure. Being easy to measure has never made anything the right thing to want.