>why should a company listen to a gallup poll of ~1,500 people over their own internal metrics?

for the same reason Vladimir Putin should listen to Russian milbloggers rather than his own subordinates, the metrics are being cooked up by people who get promoted for good metrics

I think good governance would listen to polls over metrics.

A good example of how this works is cocaine.

Capitalism and competition isn't always good governance. It works brilliantly in many places, such as restaurants or commodity goods. It fails completely for medicine or banking. It's in between for tech or education, but it's clearly failing for AI.