It raises an interesting question though, if you were in a class that graded on a curve, did you do just enough to get an A or did you always get enough to insure it would be an A minimum?
Then the harder aspect of that, did your getting an A ever result in someone else getting a B grade? If it did would that make getting the A 'better'?
The question relates to the 'game' aspect of success. At Google, for example, when I was there it had a lot of money and not a lot of real[1] projects. So a number of people used gamification as a means of defining success. Specifically they would seek out 'win' such as having their project grow at the expense of others, or create the maximum amount of change in the shortest amount of time, or any number of ways to create a scoring system and then to 'win' based on that scoring system.
The insight you had, and I came to later, was that if you're button is 'win' and you take away the obvious 'company gets "better"' scoring system, people invent their own.I concluded that one of the jobs of 'management' in that scenario, is to help define a scoring system that allows folks who are 'wired to win' be successful and not be destructive to those around them.
[1] 'real' in the sense that few projects would make money for the company or cause it to lose money, they existed primarily as science projects to keep the engineers busy.