That sounds like corporate america science, too. Actually, it's a pretty standard practice for most businesses to engage in (which is horrifying). It's so easy to manipulate statistics. That was actually one of the main points one of my professors used to make about statistics. He actually used to make aim for goals rather than just working with the data without some hypothesis to prove. He wanted us to be very aware of how overall meaningless statistics could be and how to never trust what is said but to look at the whole picture of how those numbers were obtained. That might have been one of my favorite classes.