All of this feels like a side effect of a low trust environment. I respect the author's creativity, but the environment described sounds highly dysfunctional. In my opinion, if the ceo is demanding an arbitrary metric from his subordinate without being able to articulate what they are looking for sufficiently that the subordinate has to invent a made up number just to justify their existence, that sounds like poor leadership to me. Of course, this is only based on the author's side and perhaps I'd feel differently if I heard the other side.