Business Incentive Quotes

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People will typically be more enthusiastic where they feel a sense of belonging and see themselves as part of a community than they will in a workplace in which each person is left to his own devices
Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes)
Pick a leader who will make their citizens proud. One who will stir the hearts of the people, so that the sons and daughters of a given nation strive to emulate their leader's greatness. Only then will a nation be truly great, when a leader inspires and produces citizens worthy of becoming future leaders, honorable decision makers and peacemakers. And in these times, a great leader must be extremely brave. Their leadership must be steered only by their conscience, not a bribe.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Pick a leader who will keep jobs in your country by offering companies incentives to hire only within their borders, not one who allows corporations to outsource jobs for cheaper labor when there is a national employment crisis. Choose a leader who will invest in building bridges, not walls. Books, not weapons. Morality, not corruption. Intellectualism and wisdom, not ignorance. Stability, not fear and terror. Peace, not chaos. Love, not hate. Convergence, not segregation. Tolerance, not discrimination. Fairness, not hypocrisy. Substance, not superficiality. Character, not immaturity. Transparency, not secrecy. Justice, not lawlessness. Environmental improvement and preservation, not destruction. Truth, not lies.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I'm as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will vanish.The few who might want to learn will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers--or should I say, nurses?--will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us.
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
There are three basic flavours of incentive: economic, social and moral.
Steven D. Levitt (Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything)
Pick a leader who will not only bail out banks and airlines, but also families from losing their homes -- or jobs due to their companies moving to other countries. Pick a leader who will fund schools, not limit spending on education and allow libraries to close. Pick a leader who chooses diplomacy over war. An honest broker in foreign relations. A leader with integrity, one who says what they mean, keeps their word and does not lie to their people. Pick a leader who is strong and confident, yet humble. Intelligent, but not sly. A leader who encourages diversity, not racism. One who understands the needs of the farmer, the teacher, the doctor, and the environmentalist -- not only the banker, the oil tycoon, the weapons developer, or the insurance and pharmaceutical lobbyist.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
With limited accountability, misaligned incentives, and lagging legislation, today’s governance systems and structures do not align with the sustainability of humanity or the planet that hosts us.
Roger Spitz (The Definitive Guide to Thriving on Disruption: Volume IV - Disruption as a Springboard to Value Creation)
Like any other tool for facilitating the completion of a questionable task, rewards offer a "how" answer to what is really a "why" question.
Alfie Kohn (Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A's, Praise and Other Bribes)
We have made money our god and called it the good life. We have trained our children to go for jobs hat bring the quickest corporate advancements at the highest financial levels. We have taught them careerism but not ministry and wonder why ministers are going out of fashion. We fear coddling the poor with food stamps while we call tax breaks for the rich business incentives. We make human community the responsibility of government institutions while homelessness, hunger, and drugs seep from the centers of our cities like poison from open sores for which we do not seek either the cause or the cure. We have created a bare and sterile world of strangers where exploitation is a necessary virtue. We have reduced life to the lowest of values so that the people who have much will not face the prospect of having less. Underlying all of it, we have made women the litter bearers of a society where disadvantage clings to the bottom of the institutional ladder and men funnel to the top, where men are privileged and women are conscripted for the comfort of the human race. We define women as essential to the development of the home but unnecessary to the development of society. We make them poor and render them powerless and shuttle them from man to man. We sell their bodies and question the value of their souls. We call them unique and say they have special natures, which we then ignore in their specialness. We decide that what is true of men is true of women and then say that women are not as smart as men, as strong as men, or as capable as men. We render half the human race invisible and call it natural. We tolerate war and massacre, mayhem and holocaust to right the wrongs that men say need righting and then tell women to bear up and accept their fate in silence when the crime is against them. What’s worse, we have applauded it all—the militarism, the profiteering, and the sexisms—in the name of patriotism, capitalism, and even religion. We consider it a social problem, not a spiritual one. We think it has something to do with modern society and fail to imagine that it may be something wrong with the modern soul. We treat it as a state of mind rather than a state of heart. Clearly, there is something we are failing to see.
Joan D. Chittister (Heart of Flesh: Feminist Spirituality for Women and Men)
If we can find short-term incentives that are consistent with our long-term objectives, it is much easier to make the right decisions in the moment.
Tom Rath (Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements)
He had been taught as a child that Urras was a festering mass of inequity, iniquity, and waste. But all the people he met, and all the people he saw, in the smallest country village, were well dressed, well fed, and contrary to his expectations, industrious. They did not stand about sullenly waiting to be ordered to do things. Just like Anaresti, they were simply busy getting things done. It puzzled him. He had assumed that if you removed a human being's natural incentive to work -- his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy -- and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker. But no careless workers kept those lovely farmlands, or made the superb cars and comfortable trains. The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.
Ursula K. Le Guin (The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia)
Our prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. People are born with intrinsic motivation, self-respect, dignity, curiosity to learn, joy in learning. The forces of destruction begin with toddlers—a prize for the best Halloween costume, grades in school, gold stars—and on up through the university. On the job, people, teams, and divisions are ranked, reward for the top, punishment for the bottom. Management by Objectives, quotas, incentive pay, business plans, put together separately, division by division, cause further loss, unknown and unknowable.
Peter M. Senge (The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization)
Good management has a lot to do with incentives and decentives. It's about making sure the company has systems in place that incentivize desired behaviors and decentivize undesirable behavior.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
From the earliest days at Apple, I realized that we thrived when we created intellectual property. If people copied or stole our software, we’d be out of business. If it weren’t protected, there’d be no incentive for us to make new software or product designs. If protection of intellectual property begins to disappear, creative companies will disappear or never get started. But there’s a simpler reason: It’s wrong to steal. It hurts other people. And it hurts your own character.
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
18 NEVER PAY YOUR LAWYER BY THE HOUR Incentive Super-Response Tendency To control a rat infestation, French colonial rulers in Hanoi in the nineteenth century passed a law: for every dead rat handed in to the authorities, the catcher would receive a reward. Yes, many rats were destroyed, but many were also bred specially for this purpose. In 1947, when the Dead Sea scrolls were discovered, archaeologists set a finder’s fee for each new parchment. Instead of lots of extra scrolls being found, they were simply torn apart to increase the reward. Similarly, in China in the nineteenth century, an incentive was offered for finding dinosaur bones. Farmers located a few on their land, broke them into pieces and cashed in. Modern incentives are no better: company boards promise bonuses for achieved targets. And what happens? Managers invest more energy in trying to lower the targets than in growing the business. These are examples of the incentive super-response tendency. Credited to Charlie Munger, this titanic name describes a rather trivial observation: people respond to incentives by doing what is in their best interests. What is noteworthy is, first, how quickly and radically people’s behaviour changes when incentives come into play or are altered and, second, the fact that people respond to the incentives themselves and not the grander intentions behind them.
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making)
That said, I dare to hope that one day the online advertising business model will die in a fucking dumpster fire; that the news media will no longer have incentives to optimize content for emotional impact but, rather, for informational utility; that technology will seek not to exploit our psychological fragility but, rather, to counterbalance it; that information will be worth something again; that anything will be worth something again.
Mark Manson (Everything Is F*cked: A Book About Hope)
The Industrial Revolution started and made its biggest strides in England because of her uniquely inclusive economic institutions. These in turn were built on foundations laid by the inclusive political institutions brought about by the Glorious Revolution. It was the Glorious Revolution that strengthened and rationalized property rights, improved financial markets, undermined state-sanctioned monopolies in foreign trade, and removed the barriers to the expansion of industry. It was the Glorious Revolution that made the political system open and responsive to the economic needs and aspirations of society. These inclusive economic institutions gave men of talent and vision such as James Watt the opportunity and incentive to develop their skills and ideas and influence the system in ways that benefited them and the nation. Naturally these men, once they had become successful, had the same urges as any other person. They wanted to block others from entering their businesses and competing against them and feared the process of creative destruction that might put them out of business, as they had previously bankrupted others.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
While families had incentives to curtail women’s work outside the home, employers had countervailing incentives to try to tap this large potential source of workers. Early New England mill owners, for example, tried to reassure parents of the safety and propriety of letting their daughters work in their businesses by having all-female workforces, often overseen by older women who in effect were chaperons, especially when the young women lived away from home.
Thomas Sowell (Economic Facts and Fallacies)
People act in ways to maximize their self-interest within a company, so create incentives that align employee's objectives with the organization's mission statement. Reward compliance with core values as much as profitability, especially in the face of competitive pressures.
Kent Alan Robinson (UnSend: Email, text, and social media disasters...and how to avoid them)
I think my political transformation began with my exposure to the business-as-usual attitude of many civil service bureaucrats during the war; then came the attempted Communist take-over of the picture business, which a lot of my liberal friends refused to admit ever happened; next, I had a brief experience living in a country that promised the kind of womb-to-tomb utopian benevolence a lot of these liberal friends wanted to bring to America. In 1949, I spent four months in England filming The Hasty Heart while the Labor Party was in power. I saw firsthand how the welfare state sapped incentive to work from many people in a wonderful and dynamic country.
Ronald Reagan (An American Life: The Autobiography)
Because when the law implicitly or explicitly limits internal competition and bars new entrants, businesses have little, if any, incentive to innovate. As a result, regulated businesses—which include public utilities, air travel, defense, health care, and food and drugs—have fallen dangerously far behind in adopting exponential technologies. Once the disruptors do find a way in, collapse is that much more sudden.
Larry Downes (Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation)
Another Presidential election was less than two years off. There would have to be fast work to ward off disaster. Far-sighted people, North and South, even foresaw the laboring people soon forsaking both of the old parties and going Socialist. Politicians and business men shuddered at the thought of such a tragedy and saw horrible visions of old-age pensions, eight-hour laws, unemployment insurance, workingmen’s compensation, minimum-wage legislation, abolition of child labor, dissemination of birth-control information, monthly vacations for female workers, two-month vacations for prospective mothers, both with pay, and the probable killing of individual initiative and incentive by taking the ownership of national capital out of the hands of two million people and putting it into the hands of one hundred and twenty million.
George S. Schuyler (Black No More)
Encouraging consumers to think more seriously about the financial, environmental, and personal costs of their consumption would be a major step in addressing the crisis of quality and the environmental and social impacts of too much stuff. Better yet, it would spur businesses to seek economic incentives to design and market better products. Today's secondhand economy, faltering in search of quality, should have more than it can handle.
Adam Minter (Secondhand: Travels in the New Global Garage Sale)
Blogs are assailed on all sides, by the crushing economics of the business, dishonest sources, inhuman deadlines, pageview quotas, inaccurate information, greedy publishers, poor training, the demands of the audience, and so much more. These incentives are real, whether you're at The Huffington Post or some tiny blog. Taken individually, the resulting output is obvious: bad stories, incomplete stories, wrong stories, unimportant stories.
Ryan Holiday (Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator)
A more recent concern relates to “financialization” and associated short-termism. Financialization is the growing importance of norms, metrics, and incentives from the financial sector to the wider economy. Some of the concerns expressed are that, for example, managers are increasingly awarded stock options to align their incentives with those of shareholders; companies are often explicitly managed to increase short-term shareholder value; and financial engineering, such as share buybacks and earnings management, has become a more important part of senior managers’ jobs. The end result is that rather than finance serving business, business serves finance: the tail wags the dog. What John Kay described as “obliquity,” the idea that making money was a consequence of, or a second-order benefit of, serving one’s customers and building good businesses, is driven out (Kay 2010).
Jonathan Haskel (Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy)
The transformation of a business-as-usual culture into one focused on innovation and driven by design involves activities, decisions, and attitudes. Workshops help expose people to design thinking as a new approach. Pilot projects help market the benefits of design thinking within the organization. Leadership focuses the program of change and gives people permission to learn and experiment. Assembling interdisciplinary teams ensures that the effort is broadly based. Dedicated spaces such as the P&G Innovation Gym provide a resource for longer-term thinking and ensure that the effort will be sustained. Measurement of impacts, both quantitative and qualitative, helps make the business case and ensures that resources are appropriately allocated. It may make sense to establish incentives for business units to collaborate in new ways so that younger talent sees innovation as a path to success rather than as a career risk.
Tim Brown (Change by Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation)
The key issue in economics is not aligning incentives with some putative public good but aligning knowledge with power. Business investments have both a financial and an epistemic yield. Capitalism catalytically joins the two. Capitalist economies grow because they award wealth to its creators, who have already proved that they can increase it. Their tests yield knowledge because they are falsifiable; they can be exposed as wrong. Businesses are subject to failure.
George Gilder (Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World)
Open source philosophies once promised to democratize access to cutting-edge technologies radically. Yet for AI, the eventual outcome of the high-stakes battle between open and closed systems remains highly uncertain. Powerful incentives pull major corporate powers to co-opt open source efforts for greater profit and control, however subtly such dynamics might unfold. Yet independent open communities intrinsically chafe against restrictions and centralized control over capacity to innovate. Both sides are digging in for a long fight.
I. Almeida (Introduction to Large Language Models for Business Leaders: Responsible AI Strategy Beyond Fear and Hype (Byte-sized Learning Book 2))
Government courts seek to stay in power and maintain their influence. They depend on other parts of government for their budgets and have no incentive to go against the general agenda. Once this relationship is established, it is easy for politicians to pass laws that go completely against any rational sense of justice and have the courts behind them. Courts become part of the machine, convicting us of victimless crimes to keep police busy, keeping the politicians and their sponsors happy, and providing a flow of bodies to the prisons.
Adam Kokesh (Freedom!)
A prison is perhaps the easiest place to see the power of bad incentives. And yet in many walks of life, we find otherwise normal men and women caught in the same trap and busily making the world much less good than it could be. Elected officials ignore long-term problems because they must pander to the short-term interests of voters. People working for insurance companies rely on technicalities to deny desperately ill patients the care they need. CEOs and investment bankers run extraordinary risks—both for their businesses and for the economy as a whole—because they reap the rewards of success without suffering the penalties of failure. District attorneys continue to prosecute people they know to be innocent because their careers depend on winning cases. Our government fights a war on drugs that creates the very problem of black-market profits and violence that it pretends to solve. We need systems that are wiser than we are. We need institutions and cultural norms that make us more honest and ethical than we tend to be. The project of building them is distinct from—and, in my view, even more important than—an individual’s refining his personal ethical code.
Sam Harris (Lying)
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Daniel Pink reviews the research on human motivation for the past forty years and concludes that most businesses are ignoring what the scientific evidence clearly suggests they should do.7 They continue to manage by relying heavily on extrinsic motivators, symbolized by the proverbial carrot-and-stick approach—the use of incentives and threats. But extrinsic motivators are only effective when the work lacks inherent meaning and the potential for creativity and satisfaction, such as with assembly lines where simple rote tasks must be repeated without end.
John E. Mackey (Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business)
There was no reason why Fox, which, by the time I joined, had been in business for nearly a decade and had been number one in the ratings for more than two years, should still have been running such a rinky-dink operation, with broken-down tape machines, control rooms that smelled like a sewer whenever it rained more than half an inch, chronic intentional understaffing, and a workforce composed of barely trained, underpaid children like myself. But that was the business model, and the ratings were good enough—and the on-air product was just this side of mistake-free enough—that there was no incentive for the bosses to change it.
Joe Muto (An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media)
Know then that the arbitrary appropriation by the government of men’s property results in the loss of all incentive to gain, when men realize that what they have accumulated will be taken away firom them. A loss of incentive will lead to a slackening in enterprise, the slackening being proportional to the extent and degree of confiscation. Thus if confiscation is widespread, covering all forms of economic activity, there will be a general slackening, owing to the feeling that no branch offers any longer any hope of gain. If however confiscation be mild, there will be only a relatively slight falling off in economic activity. Now the state of a society and the prosperity of business depend on the intensity of human efforts and the search for gain; should, therefore, men slacken in their economic activity the markets would slump and the state of society deteriorate. People would forsake that country and migrate elsewhere in search of gain, the result being a general depopulation and the desertion of cities. And this deterioration in society would be followed by a weakening of the State, for the State is as the Form whose condition follows that of its Matter, Society. . . Oppression ruins society, while the ruin of society leads to the weakening and destruction of the State.
Ibn Khaldun
Within a few centuries, the new capitalist spirit challenged the basic Christian ethic: the boundless ego of Sir Gales Overreach and his fellows in the marketplace had no room for charity or love in any of their ancient senses. The capitalist scheme of values in fact transformed five of the seven deadly sins of Christianity-pride, envy, greed, avarice, and lust-into positive social virtues, treating them as necessary incentives to all economic enterprise; while the cardinal virtues, beginning with love and humility, were rejected as 'bad for business,' except in the degree that they made the working class more docile and more amenable to cold-blooded exploitation.
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
received a message on LinkedIn from an IBM executive who wrote, “Pat, I’ve been at IBM for a while and I have been following your content for a few years. I make good money, but I really want to be an entrepreneur. However, I have a wife and three kids and I’m kind of worried about them. What should I do?” We emailed back and forth for a while, and I asked him questions about who he wanted to be. He began to see that intrapreneurship looked like the ideal choice for him. This is when you’re part of a company and create a new business unit, lead a new initiative, or work out incentives that reward you for driving growth and innovation. In some cases, it might just mean being so indispensable that a company has to pay you equity to retain you.
Patrick Bet-David (Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy)
The mated males are biased. They want more females here for their own females. Many of the single males will likely have an issue, since it is tradition.” “Well if the single males want more females here, that’s the only way to do it. They’re only hurting themselves.” His fingers flexed slightly against hers. “Why do you think females would come here, anyway?” “Why wouldn’t they? I knew nothing about this sector and even after my tour I still don’t know much about it. Maybe if there was an attraction here— other than the males— it would bring more females.” He straightened and pushed up so that his hands caged her against the headboard. “This facility puts out the best warriors and we do some of the most intense and covert off-world missions. We will not have attractions here like a… carnival.” She blinked, realizing he’d misunderstood her. Unable to stop herself, a giggle escaped. She cupped the side of his face. Midnight black stubble already covered his jaw. She shivered, remembering the feel of it against her inner thighs not too long ago. “I didn’t mean that kind of attraction. I mean, give the females an incentive, like luxury housing or the chance to run a business here. There are so many business opportunities here for women. So far I’ve only seen one clothing shop and one bakery run by females.” He was silent a long moment as he watched her. “I think I might be biased too.” “How so?” “Because I want to change the law simply to please you.” The way he said it was almost grudging.
Savannah Stuart (Claimed by the Warrior (Lumineta, #3))
For if single women are looking for government to create a "hubby state" for them, what is certainly true is that their male counterparts have a long enjoy the fruits of a related "wifey state," in which the nation and its government supported male independence in a variety of ways. Men, and especially married wealthy white men, have a long relied on government assistance. It's a government that has historically supported white men's home and business ownership through grants, loans, incentives, and tax breaks. It has allowed them to accrue wealth and offer them shortcuts and bonuses for passing it down to their children. Government established white men's right to vote and thus exert control over the government at the nation's founding and has protected their enfranchisement. It has also bolstered the economic and professional prospects of men by depressing the economic prospects of women: by failing to offer women equivalent economic and civic protections, thus helping to create conditions whereby women were forced to be dependent on those men, creating a gendered class of laborers who took low paying or unpaid jobs doing the domestic and childcare work that further enabled men to dominate public spheres. But the growth of a massive population of women who are living outside those dependent circumstances puts new pressures on the government: to remake conditions in a way that will be more hospitable to female independence, to a citizenry now made up of plenty of women living economically, professionally, sexually, and socially liberated lives.
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies)
Because incentives trigger a primitive, engrained response, they produce a number of unintended consequences. First, they strongly reinforce self-aggrandizement, so much so that people can dedicate highly creative energy toward the counterproductive purpose of gaming the system. Second, they focus people’s attention on the incentive, rather than on customers. Third, they reduce the sense of agency and locus of control in workers, placing it instead in the hands of those who are creating the incentives and providing the rewards. This not only undermines the ability to be self-managing, it also infantilizes people. Thus it is small wonder, given the ubiquity of this practice, that Americans struggle to see themselves as engaged, empowered participants in their own democratic institutions.
Carol Sanford (The Regenerative Business: Redesign Work, Cultivate Human Potential, Achieve Extraordinary Outcomes)
Singapore's tragedy is not the absence of idealism, but that it systematically rewards the individualistic majority and discourages the socially-conscious minority. This is at odds with Singapore's self-image as a communitarian Asian society, an image conjured up largely to justify the protection of family values and paternalistic government. In truth, the overwhelming ethos is to mind your own business. Singapore's embrace of the market forces - based on the PAP's clear appreciation of the fact that people's desire to live in comfort is the most powerful force for civilisation's progress - has provided rich incentives for Singaporeans to work hard, and create wealth. But its exercise of illiberal controls to maintain ownership of the public sphere adds up to a heavy tax on thinking socially and acting politically. The public has been privatised.
Cherian George (Singapore: The Air-conditioned Nation. Essays on the Politics of Comfort and Control, 1990-2000)
Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” Munger’s
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
If there are costs to becoming legal, there are also bound to be costs to remaining outside the law. We found that operating outside the world of legal work and business was surprisingly expensive. In Peru, for example, the cost of operating a business extralegally includes paying 10 to 15 per cent of its annual income in bribes and commissions to authorities. Add to such payoffs the costs of avoiding penalties, making transfers outside legal channels and operating from dispersed locations and without credit, and the life of the extralegal entrepreneur turns out to be far more costly and full of daily hassles than that of the legal businessman. Perhaps the most significant cost was caused by the absence of institutions that create incentives for people to seize economic and social opportunities to specialize within the market place. We found that people who could not operate within the law also could not hold property efficiently or enforce contracts through the courts; nor could they reduce uncertainty through limited liability systems and insurance policies, or create stock companies to attract additional capital and share risk. Being unable to raise money for investment, they could not achieve economies of scale or protect their innovations through royalties and patents.
Hernando de Soto (The Mystery Of Capital)
Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.
Michael E. Mann (The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet)
Managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talent are all necessary, but they can be applied only to goals that have already been defined by military policies, broad and narrow. And those policies can be only as good as strategy, operational art of war, tactical thought, and plain military craft that have gone into their making. At present, the defects of structure submerge or distort strategy and operational art, they out rightly suppress tactical ingenuity, and they displace the traditional insights and rules of military craft in favor of bureaucratic preferences, administrative convenience, and abstract notions of efficiency derived from the world of business management. First there is the defective structure for making of military decisions under the futile supervision of the civilian Defense Department; then come the deeply flawed defense policies and military choices, replete with unnecessary costs and hidden risks; finally there come the undoubted managerial abilities, bureaucratic skills, technical expertise, and political talents, all applied to achieve those flawed policies and to implement those flawed choices. By this same sequence was the fatally incomplete Maginot Line built, as were all the Maginot Lines of history, each made no better by good government, technical talent, careful accounting, or sheer hard work. Hence the futility of all the managerial innovations tried in the Pentagon over the years. In the purchasing of weapons, for example, “total package” procurement, cost plus incentive contracting, “firm fixed price” purchasing have all been introduced with much fanfare, only to be abandoned, retried, and repudiated once again. And each time a new Secretary of Defense arrives, with him come the latest batch of managerial innovations, many of them aimed at reducing fraud, waste, and mismanagement-the classic trio endlessly denounced in Congress, even though they account for mere percentage points in the total budget, and have no relevance at all to the failures of combat. The persistence of the Administrator’s Delusion has long kept the Pentagon on a treadmill of futile procedural “reforms” that have no impact at all on the military substance of our defense. It is through strategy, operational art, tactical ingenuity, and military craft that the large savings can be made, and the nation’s military strength greatly increased, but achieving long-overdue structural innovations, from the central headquarters to the combat forces, from the overhead of bases and installations to the current purchase of new weapons. Then, and only then, will it be useful to pursue fraud, waste, and mismanagement, if only to save a few dollars more after the billions have already been saved. At present, by contrast, the Defense Department administers ineffectively, while the public, Congress, and the media apply their energies to such petty matters as overpriced spare parts for a given device in a given weapon of a given ship, overlooking at the same time the multibillion dollar question of money spent for the Navy as a whole instead of the Army – whose weakness diminishes our diplomatic weight in peacetime, and which could one day cause us to resort to nuclear weapons in the face of imminent debacle. If we had a central military authority and a Defense Department capable of strategy, we should cheerfully tolerate much fraud, waste, and mismanagement; but so long as there are competing military bureaucracies organically incapable of strategic combat, neither safety nor economy will be ensured, even if we could totally eliminate every last cent of fraud, waste, and mismanagement.
Edward N. Luttwak
The quality of our thinking is largely influenced by the mental models in our heads. While we want accurate models, we also want a wide variety of models to uncover what’s really happening. The key here is variety. Most of us study something specific and don’t get exposure to the big ideas of other disciplines. We don’t develop the multidisciplinary mindset that we need to accurately see a problem. And because we don’t have the right models to understand the situation, we overuse the models we do have and use them even when they don’t belong. You’ve likely experienced this first hand. An engineer will often think in terms of systems by default. A psychologist will think in terms of incentives. A business person might think in terms of opportunity cost and risk-reward. Through their disciplines, each of these people sees part of the situation, the part of the world that makes sense to them. None of them, however, see the entire situation unless they are thinking in a multidisciplinary way. In short, they have blind spots. Big blind spots. And they’re not aware of their blind spots. [...] Relying on only a few models is like having a 400-horsepower brain that’s only generating 50 horsepower of output. To increase your mental efficiency and reach your 400-horsepower potential, you need to use a latticework of mental models. Exactly the same sort of pattern that graces backyards everywhere, a lattice is a series of points that connect to and reinforce each other. The Great Models can be understood in the same way—models influence and interact with each other to create a structure that can be used to evaluate and understand ideas. [...] Without a latticework of the Great Models our decisions become harder, slower, and less creative. But by using a mental models approach, we can complement our specializations by being curious about how the rest of the world works. A quick glance at the Nobel Prize winners list show that many of them, obviously extreme specialists in something, had multidisciplinary interests that supported their achievements. [...] The more high-quality mental models you have in your mental toolbox, the more likely you will have the ones needed to understand the problem. And understanding is everything. The better you understand, the better the potential actions you can take. The better the potential actions, the fewer problems you’ll encounter down the road. Better models make better decisions.
Shane Parrish (The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts)
Instead, the problem that has made the world so dark and crazy lately is the BUMMER machine, and the core of the BUMMER machine is not a technology, exactly, but a style of business plan that spews out perverse incentives and corrupts people. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Posición en Kindle508-510). Henry Holt and Co.. Edición de Kindle.
Lanier, Jaron
Those of Nogales, Sonora, are not so lucky. They live in a different world shaped by different institutions. These different institutions create very disparate incentives for the inhabitants of the two Nogaleses and for the entrepreneurs and businesses willing to invest there. These incentives created by the different institutions of the Nogaleses and the countries in which they are situated are the main reason for the differences in economic prosperity on the two sides of the border.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
This situation is called a prisoners’ dilemma because both sides are led to take an action that is against their mutual interest.* In the classic version of the prisoners’ dilemma, the police are separately interrogating two suspects. Each is given an incentive to be the first to confess and a much harsher sentence if he holds out while the other confesses. Thus each finds it advantageous to confess, though they would both do better if each kept quiet.
Avinash K. Dixit (The Art of Strategy: A Game Theorist's Guide to Success in Business and Life)
Frequently, Development will take responsibility for responding to changes in the market, deploying features and changes into production as quickly as possible. IT Operations will take responsibility for providing customers with IT service that is stable, reliable, and secure, making it difficult or even impossible for anyone to introduce production changes that could jeopardize production. Configured this way, Development and IT Operations have diametrically opposed goals and incentives.
Gene Kim (The Phoenix Project: A Novel about IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win)
Free women of color were permitted to inherit, own property, businesses, and slaves; it was not expected that they would marry. The comparative economic and sexual liberty experienced by these libre women provided them some incentive to steer clear of what free Maria Gentilly, who, after a husband squandered her estate, sued to recover it in the 1790s,17 called “the yoke of matrimony.
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
As Charlie Munger has said, “I think I’ve been in the top 5% of my age cohort almost my entire adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I’ve always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower.” An example from FedEx is one of his favorite cases in point. As he explains, the integrity of the FedEx system relies heavily on the ability to unload and then quickly reload packages at one central location within an allotted time. Years ago, the company was having a terrible problem getting its workers to get all the boxes off and then back on the planes in time. They tried numerous different things that didn’t work, until someone had the brilliant idea of paying the workers by the shift as opposed to by the hour. Poof, the problem was solved.2 FedEx’s old pay-by-the-hour system rewarded those who took longer to get the job done. They were incentivized to take longer. By switching to pay-by-the-shift, workers were motivated to work faster and without error so they could go home, yet still earn the wages of a full shift. For the workers, finishing early amounted to a higher effective hourly wage. By aligning the business’s interests with the worker’s incentives, FedEx got the outcome it and its workers both desired. The
Jeremy C. Miller (Warren Buffett's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor)
Publicly traded corporations direct financial surpluses back to investors, CEOs, and boards of directors. They have little incentive to churn it back into the business and, as we have seen, a great deal of incentive to maximize surpluses at the expense of employees, the environment, and even the corporation itself.82
Douglas Rushkoff (Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity)
drive to win and the desire to make a profit are given by God to provide the incentive required for conquering exceptional challenges.
Ed Silvoso (Anointed for Business)
Government-subsidized private sector job creation is one way forward. Recently, the federal government sponsored a promising short-term subsidized jobs program through something called the TANF Emergency Fund. States that chose to participate were allowed to use TANF dollars to provide employers (mostly in the private sector) with incentives to hire unemployed workers, targeting those on TANF or those who were in a spell of extended unemployment. Each state was given considerable leeway to design the program however it saw fit, often in close collaboration with employers. Across the District of Columbia and the thirty-nine states that took part in the program, employers created more than 260,000 jobs with an investment of only $1.3 billion dollars. Roughly two-thirds of participating employers said they created positions that would not have existed otherwise, and the businesses that took part expressed, on the whole, eagerness to participate in such a program in the future. Further, many participants remained employed after the subsidy ended, and those who had experienced significant trouble finding work especially made gains. Researchers who studied the program noted that it garnered “strong support from employers, workers, and state and local officials from across the political spectrum.” Creating a subsidized jobs program modeled on the TANF Emergency Fund would be one way to improve the circumstances of America’s $2-a-day poor.
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 A Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
With that focus on quality and discipline, NI has been profitable nearly every year, a record that Buffett claimed has left others in the dust. The key has been having incentives in place to get the right employee behavior. And for that, you must think the business through. Munger
Daniel Pecaut (University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting)
Interesting point is we discuss a lot about compensation and incentives of other people who are no way related and connected with you or business. On top of it we pass judgment. What type of behaviour is this?
Rakesh Seth
Here are a few different types of emails you can send: Common FAQs – An email that answers repeat questions you get from readers and subscribers Affiliate case study – An email that details the results from taking a course or using a tool that you’re an affiliate for Teaser to an existing post – An email that links to pillar or cornerstone pieces on your blog Tools and resources – An email that shares your favorite tool collection The Start Here – An email that links to your most important resources Break the myths – An email that lays out myths that your subscribers may think are true Behind the scenes – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into what’s going on with your business Personal story – An email that gives an insiders’ peek into your struggles or backstory One-click survey – An email that asks a simple question to segment subscribers or allows them to choose their own email journey Survey or How can I help you? – An email asking for responses or providing an offer to help Postpurchase welcome email – An email sent immediately after purchase to buyers of your offer Unexpected incentive email – A simple cheat sheet, guide, or PDF that subscribers were not expecting Favorite thing – A collection of your favorite books/blogs/stock photo sites, etc. I have used every one of these emails in my email marketing mix. Doing so breaks up the monotony of sending the same style of email each week, and each of these emails feeds your marketing goals differently as well.
Meera Kothand (300 Email Marketing Tips: Critical Advice And Strategy 
To Turn Subscribers Into Buyers & Grow 
A Six-Figure Business With Email)
To fill this gap in the capital market, Davis and Rock set themselves up as a limited partnership, the same legal structure that had been used by a short-lived rival called Draper, Gaither & Anderson.[18] Rather than identifying startups and then seeking out corporate investors, they began by raising a fund that would render corporate investors unnecessary. As the two active, or “general,” partners, Davis and Rock each seeded the fund with $100,000 of their own capital. Then, ignoring the easy loans to be had from the fashionable SBIC structure, they raised just under $3.2 million from some thirty “limited” partners—rich individuals who served as passive investors.[19] The beauty of this size and structure was that the Davis & Rock partnership now had a war chest seven and a half times larger than an SBIC, and with it the ammunition to supply companies with enough capital to grow aggressively. At the same time, by keeping the number of passive investors under the legal threshold of one hundred, the partnership flew under the regulatory radar, avoiding the restrictions that ensnared the SBICs and Doriot’s ARD.[20] Sidestepping yet another weakness to be found in their competitors, Davis and Rock promised at the outset to liquidate their fund after seven years. The general partners had their own money in the fund, and thus a healthy incentive to invest with caution. At the same time, they could deploy the outside partners’ capital for a limited time only. Their caution would be balanced with deliberate aggression. Indeed, everything about the fund’s design was calculated to support an intelligent but forceful growth mentality. Unlike the SBICs, Davis & Rock raised money purely in the form of equity, not debt. The equity providers—that is, the outside limited partners—knew not to expect dividends, so Davis and Rock were free to invest in ambitious startups that used every dollar of capital to expand their business.[21] As general partners, Davis and Rock were personally incentivized to prioritize expansion: they took their compensation in the form of a 20 percent share of the fund’s capital appreciation. Meanwhile, Rock was at pains to extend this equity mentality to the employees of his portfolio companies. Having witnessed the effect of employee share ownership on the early culture of Fairchild, he believed in awarding managers, scientists, and salesmen with stock and stock options. In sum, everybody in the Davis & Rock orbit—the limited partners, the general partners, the entrepreneurs, their key employees—was compensated in the form of equity.
Sebastian Mallaby (The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future)
No company, no matter how great, is immune to the potential doom loop of misaligned incentives and the wrong people in key seats on the bus. The doom loop begins when you get some of the wrong people on the bus who behave contrary to your company’s core values and degrade the culture. Some of these people then become powerful enough to install incentives that are misaligned with the core values. This reinforces the behavior of the wrong people and drives away the right people. The culture becomes increasingly dominated by the wrong people and increasingly inhospitable to the right people. More of the right people get off the bus, and the proportion of wrong people increases to a critical mass. And then one day, you wake up to the horrifying realization that the culture you’ve carefully cultivated has been destroyed.
Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
In combat deployment (where he earned a Silver Star for bravery and two Purple Hearts), Smith gained the central insight that would power Federal Express from an idea into a viable business, from a business into a great company. Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other.
Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don’t—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at a high level, he or she lacks the intense inner drive, the productive neurosis, required to do great things.
Jim Collins (BE 2.0 (Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0): Turning Your Business into an Enduring Great Company)
Convention also dictates that ‘big is beautiful’, but every time one of our ventures gets too big we divide it up into smaller units. I go to the deputy managing director, the deputy sales director and the deputy marketing director and say, ‘Congratulations. You’re now the MD, the sales director and the marketing director of a new company.’ Each time we’ve done this, the people involved haven’t had much more work to do, but necessarily they have a greater incentive to perform and a greater zest for their work.
Richard Branson (Losing My Virginity: How I've Survived, Had Fun, and Made a Fortune Doing Business My Way)
Pierce did not let people get in the way of his pursuit of ideas,” Mayo adds. “He did not compromise because it would make people feel good. He did his thing because he felt it was necessary to accomplish the development of ideas the way he wanted. He was excellent at that. And I loved those research people for that. They weren’t about making people feel good. They were about motivating people—not to do the conventional thing, but to do the unconventional thing.” To follow the progress of business now, Mayo adds, is to become accustomed to watching successful technology companies offer new engineers rich incentives for their work.
Jon Gertner (The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation)
Identifying Cultural Norms The following domains are areas in which cultural norms may vary significantly from company to company. Transitioning leaders should use this checklist to help them figure out how things really work in the organizations they’re joining. Influence. How do people get support for critical initiatives? Is it more important to have the support of a patron within the senior team, or affirmation from your peers and direct reports that your idea is a good one? Meetings. Are meetings filled with dialogue on hard issues, or are they simply forums for publicly ratifying agreements that have been reached in private? Execution. When it comes time to get things done, which matters more—a deep understanding of processes or knowing the right people? Conflict. Can people talk openly about difficult issues without fear of retribution? Or do they avoid conflict—or, even worse, push it to lower levels, where it can wreak havoc? Recognition. Does the company promote stars, rewarding those who visibly and vocally drive business initiatives? Or does it encourage team players, rewarding those who lead authoritatively but quietly and collaboratively? Ends versus means. Are there any restrictions on how you achieve results? Does the organization have a well-defined, well-communicated set of values that is reinforced through positive and negative incentives?
Michael D. Watkins (The First 90 Days: Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed Faster and Smarter)
The second footprint expansion issue is a volume incentive—you want to incent your customers to give you more of their business. You get the behavior that you reward, not what you desire (Kerr, 2008); if you want a customer to give you more of their business, you need to reward them for doing so.
Victoria Medvec (Negotiate Without Fear: Strategies and Tools to Maximize Your Outcomes)
If all you do is to reduce price, then all you do is not get paid a lot of money. As you think about expanding footprint in a customer's account, you want to consider how you can create barriers to switching from your company to someone else's (pre-payment, rebates, exclusivity, and embeddedness), how you can know more about the customer's business than others (embeddedness and exclusivity), and how you can incent the customer to give you more work (volume incentives in the form of volume discounts and rebates).
Victoria Medvec (Negotiate Without Fear: Strategies and Tools to Maximize Your Outcomes)
The rich will never be taxed. More and more often we see governments use the tax laws to provide incentives to business owners and investors to create jobs and housing. These incentives reduce the taxes of the rich. So the only place for the government to drive tax revenue is from the middle class.
Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not!)
Watch what they do, not what they say Watching what your customers are doing—or trying to do—with your product can light the way forward. But you have to be careful to pay attention to what they do and not just what they say. Expect to have your theories of human behavior tested Your theory about how individuals and groups behave should underlie your strategy, your product design, your incentive program—every decision you make. But be open and alert to when your customers show you a different theory or direction. That could become your product’s point of differentiation. Follow the leaders: Your customers To grow your business, you may have to give up control. Look for instances when your customers hack or hijack your product, and then go along for the ride. Get Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy working together Customer data is your Mr. Spock, detached and logical. Customer emotion is your Dr. McCoy, passionate and all too human. Think of yourself as Captain Kirk, responsible for making the two work together to get the best out of each.
Reid Hoffman (Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs)
INCENTIVES – “From all business, my favorite case on incentives is Federal Express. The heart and soul of their system—which creates the integrity of the product—is having all their airplanes come to one place in the middle of the night and shift all the packages from plane to plane. If there are delays, the whole operation can’t deliver a product full of integrity to Federal Express customers. And it was always screwed up. They could never get it done on time. They tried everything—moral suasion, threats, you name it. And nothing worked. Finally, somebody got the idea to pay all these people not so much an hour, but so much a shift—and when it’s all done, they can go home. Well, their problems cleared up overnight.” – Here Charlie is talking about incentives. All of us who have held hourly jobs know that if workers are paid by the hour they will work more slowly than if they are paid them by the job. Why? Because if they are paid by the hour, they have an incentive to work more slowly in order to put more hours on the clock and make more money. But if they are paid by the job, there is an incentive to work quickly so they can get onto the next job and make more money. Federal Express aligned management’s goals with employee incentives. With hourly pay their employees were never in a hurry, but when pay was given for a specific task—getting a plane loaded—suddenly they were in a rush to get the job done. The key wasn’t paying workers by the task or shift; the key was letting them go home if they finished early, which was a kind of financial reward in that they were getting paid for the full shift even if they left early.
David Clark (Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway's Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth With Commentary by David Clark)
Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.
Gautam Baid (The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated (Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing Series))
As New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Carolina looked to attract settlers, their proprietors focused on two sets of incentives: religious indifference and generous land grants. The land granted had a quasi tax placed on it, known as a quitrent. For the proprietors of vast lands, receiving the income of the quitrents, along with making the remaining land more valuable as it became populated, was the basic business model. As it turned out, the least religiously tolerant and theologically most uniform place in English America was New England; rules of Sabbath and observation were codified in most local laws. Everyone else was primarily interested in the pursuit of money, and if that meant tolerance, so be it. The Lords Proprietors of Carolina offered an especially unique incentive. For every family member brought over, the family was granted 150 acres. But the definition of family was a generous and loose one. Looking to populate Carolina from the English holdings in the Caribbean, the Lords Proprietors counted all Africans as members of their owner’s family, entitling the owner to an additional 150 acres for each slave. By 1720 this catalyzing structure led to people of African descent becoming the majority of the colony—a condition that would hold for generations.
Bhu Srinivasan (Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism)
Conway’s law tells us that we need to understand what software architecture is needed before we organize our teams, otherwise the communication paths and incentives in the organization will end up dictating the software architecture.
Matthew Skelton (Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow)
for survival. However, as the business grows and new people join the firm, it’s impossible to know everyone’s name, let alone to have strong relationships with everyone. The kind of super-direct challenges that are easy when people know each other well become difficult. Not wanting to lose the friendly culture of the early days, many hesitate to speak up when they see problems, backing off of Challenge Directly and retreating to Ruinous Empathy. Because Obnoxious Aggression is more effective than Ruinous Empathy, that kind of behavior has an advantage; people who behave badly begin to win, rising in the company. When confronted with a powerful jerk, many people retreat to Manipulative Insincerity, more out of instinctive self-protectiveness than intentional wrongdoing. In this kind of environment, there’s an incentive to retreat to Manipulative Insincerity in front of those who are more senior to them, and resort to Obnoxious Aggression with those who are less powerful. The culture becomes toxic—many kissing up and
Kim Malone Scott (Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity)
Skin in the game’ is an important psychological tool to harness if you want to accelerate your learning curve in any area of your life. Having skin in the game raises the stakes of your learning by building deeper psychological incentives to perform a behaviour. The ‘skin’ can be anything from money to a personal public commitment.
Steven Bartlett (The Diary of a CEO: The 33 Laws of Business and Life)
IBM’s marketing train wreck and Apple’s bewildering product lineup were fueled by a similar cause: decentralized businesses each had enough power to add stuff, but not enough to stop others from doing so, too. This is a twist on Hardin’s tragedy of the commons. Each business had incentives for adding yet another campaign or product, but each addition hurt IBM and Apple by confusing customers and wasting money. Although management gurus often bad-mouth leaders who exercise “command and control,” as Lou Gerstner and Steve Jobs did, sometimes that’s just what a broken organization needs.
Robert I. Sutton (The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder)
For several months during 2010, the policy makers inside GIPSA drafted a new rule that would carry out the changes required by the farm bill and take them much further. For example, the rule would ban any tournament system for chicken farmers that didn’t guarantee the farmers a predictable base payment. Tyson could only offer incentives for good performance, in other words, rather than docking a farmer’s income by adjusting the base pay rate through the tournament. The rule also made one legal change that aimed to make the PSA more powerful than ever. The rule said that if a farmer or rancher wanted to sue a company like Tyson under the Packers and Stockyards Act, the farmer had only to prove that Tyson harmed the farmer himself, not the industry as a whole. This single provision rolled back a series of federal court decisions that had basically rendered the Packers and Stockyards Act toothless. The courts had ruled that to win a case under the act, a farmer had to prove that a company’s actions amounted to an industrywide antitrust violation.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
In the hallowed halls of businesses (and business schools) around the world, B. F. Skinner is the hidden king. Skinner was one of the major intellectual forces behind the “behaviorist” movement in psychology—the idea that biological systems always respond a certain way to certain stimuli. Control the stimuli and you can control the behavior. “Condition” the organism with rewards and punishments, and the organism will learn how to behave. Over the decades, behaviorism has fallen out of vogue in psychology—research has made it clear that there’s far more to behavior than the carrot and the stick. But that understanding hasn’t extended to business practice—in corporations and business-school classrooms around the world, the search continues for the magic incentive that will make people do what businesses want.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: A World-Class Business Education in a Single Volume)
The incentive for doing this was clear for Tyson’s Foods. There were billions of dollars of profit at stake if the company could figure out how to raise pigs in the same way it raised chickens. In 1973 there were about 736,000 hog farms in the United States, which collectively made about $7.7 billion a year. It was a business still characterized by mom-and-pop producers scattered across theAmerican countryside. If Tyson could beat them at their own game by raising pigs more cheaply and voluminously, the company could steal the lucrative market for itself. If Tyson could dominate hog production, it could take on the cattle business after that.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
Here are four examples of Lead Magnets I use: A checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video. A template for determining, say, a business’s profit margin. An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos. A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free. For me, it is 11 Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500/Day from Your Phone. The appropriate opt-in incentive depends on your content. Here are other types of examples: A DIY carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table. A marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls. A landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of grass to use around the United States. YouTuber Nick True at Mapped Out Money, who makes video tutorials that teach the best practices for using the personal budgeting software YNAB, found that he gets the highest sign-up rates when he offers a checklist that relates to the video. His followers really like having a resource that they can use to put his advice into practice. Jess Dante of Love and London runs a YouTube channel helping viewers plan their trips to London by suggesting lesser-known restaurants and stores to visit. Her superstar opt-in incentive is a free London 101 Guide with everything a first-time visitor needs to know. It’s been downloaded more than 45,000 times. Where you make your call to action will also have an impact on your success building your email list. You can make your call to action in a variety of places or ways inside your videos. One of the best ways is to give a short, relevant tease of the bonus or resource you’re offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more. CHALLENGE Create a Lead Magnet. It’s time to create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration. If you want to turn it into a big thing later on, great. But start SMALL. Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to get Lead Magnet templates! (See what I did there?)
Noah Kagan (Million Dollar Weekend: The Surprisingly Simple Way to Launch a 7-Figure Business in 48 Hours)
Senior executives inside IBP realized that raising cattle was a waste of money. So at Garden City, IBP employed a new way to procure a steady stream of cows. It was called the “formula contract.” The formula contract created a way for IBP to lock in a steady supply of cattle without having to go out on the open market and haggle for them, as meatpackers always had. Instead, IBP signed contracts with a rancher or feedlot, agreeing to buy a set number of cattle at a set date.3 The price for those cattle, when they were delivered, was based on a formula rather than a competitive bid. IBP created a formula price that allowed the company to start controlling its cattle supply in a way that mimicked Tyson’s methods for controlling its chicken supply. IBP couldn’t simply dictate what kind of animals it slaughtered, the way Tyson did, but it could use contracts to exert influence over the ranches. IBP’s formula contained a series of discounts and premiums that rewarded some qualities in the cow while punishing others. These discounts were crude levels that IBP used to shape the kind of cattle ranchers raised. Early on, for example, IBP controlled the size of the cows ranchers delivered by discounting those that were too big and those that were too small. The formula acted as a market incentive all its own, slowly bending the characteristics of the cattle herd to IBP’s specifications. It was still a long way from the exacting control Tyson had over its chicken flocks, but the formulas would evolve over the decades.
Christopher Leonard (The Meat Racket: The Secret Takeover of America's Food Business)
...one great advantage of scale taught in all of the business schools of the world is cost reductions along the so called experience curve. Just doing something complicated in more and more volume enables human beings, who are trying to improve and are motivated by the incentives of capitalism, to do it more and more efficiently. The very nature of things is that if you get a whole lot of volume through your operation, you get better at processing that volume. That's an enormous advantage. And it has a lot to do with which businesses succeed and fail.
Charlie Munger, "Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger"
I believe in the power of business to positively shape the world. It was the business opportunity offered by the legalization of cannabis that provided the practical incentives to destigmatize its use and reverse decades of injustice and harmful propaganda. Whether it is cannabis legalization or emerging products, technologies or industries, we must embrace disruption. Change is good, change is opportunity. Change is evolution.
Adam Bierman (Weed Empire: How I Battled Gangsters, Investment Banks, and the Department of Justice to Build the Cannabis Industry in America)
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems Understanding Solar Energy Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Harnessing the power of the sun to generate clean and renewable energy has become increasingly essential in today's world. Solar rooftop systems offer a sustainable solution for both residential and commercial properties to reduce reliance on traditional grid electricity and lower carbon emissions. By understanding the fundamentals of solar energy and recognizing the significance of solar rooftop installations, individuals and businesses in Bangalore can pave the way towards a more environmentally conscious and cost-effective energy future. # Solar Rooftop in Bangalore - Sunease Solar ## Introduction to Solar Rooftop Systems ### Understanding Solar Energy Solar energy is like the coolest kid on the block when it comes to renewable energy sources. It's basically sunlight transformed into electricity, which is pretty neat if you ask me. ### Importance of Solar Rooftop Systems Solar rooftop systems are like the superheroes of the energy world - they harness the power of the sun right from your rooftop. They not only help you save money but also reduce your carbon footprint. Win-win! ## Benefits of Solar Rooftop Installations ### Financial Savings Imagine cutting down on those hefty electricity bills - that's what solar rooftop installations do. They help you save money in the long run while also increasing the value of your property . It resembles having your cake and eating it as well! ### Environmental Impact By switching to solar energy, you're basically giving Mother Earth a virtual high-five. Solar rooftop installations reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help combat climate change. So, you're not just saving money, you're saving the planet. NBD. ### Energy Independence Who doesn't want to be a little more independent, am I right? Solar Rooftop in Bangaloreprovide you with a sense of self-sufficiency when it comes to energy. You're not at the mercy of fluctuating electricity prices anymore. It's like taking control of your energy destiny. ## Solar Rooftop Initiatives in Bangalore ### Government Policies and Incentives Bangalore is all about that solar love. The government has rolled out various policies and incentives to promote solar rooftop installations. It resembles they're saying, "Here's something special to do your change to sun oriented considerably better." ### Community Programs and Awareness Communities in Bangalore are coming together to spread the good word about solar energy. From awareness campaigns to collective installations, they're making sure everyone knows that solar is the way to go. It's like a solar revolution, but with a cool community twist. ## Sunease Solar: A Leader in Solar Rooftop Solutions ### Company Overview Sunease Solar is basically the Gandalf of solar rooftop solutions - wise, reliable, and always there when you need them. They're experts in the field, making the switch to solar as easy as pie (solar-powered pie, of course). ### Product Offerings From sleek solar panels to cutting-edge inverters, Sunease Solar has it all. They offer top-notch products that are not only efficient but also look pretty darn good on your rooftop. It's like having the Ferraris of solar installations. ### Customer Success Stories Customers love Sunease Solar, and for good reason. Their success stories speak volumes about the quality of service and satisfaction they provide. It's like a feel-good movie, but with solar panels instead of actors. 5. Key Features of Solar Rooftop Systems Panel Efficiency and Durability When it comes to Solar Rooftop in Bangalore, panel efficiency and durability are key factors to consider.
Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Introduction to Solar Rooftop in Bangalore Solar rooftop systems have emerged as a game-changing innovation in Bangalore's energy consumption, providing a green and sustainable alternative to conventional sources of power. Solar rooftops are gaining a lot of traction among residential, commercial, and industrial users in the city as it deals with rising energy demands and environmental concerns. This article examines the advantages, drawbacks, government initiatives, case studies, and prospects for the future of solar rooftops, which have had a profound effect on Bangalore's energy landscape. 1. Introduction to Bangalore's Solar Rooftops An Overview of Bangalore's Solar Rooftop Systems Ah, Bangalore! Home to tech whiz kids, filter coffee connoisseurs, and now the progressive pioneers who are embracing solar rooftops! The eco-friendly Batman of the energy industry, solar rooftop systems are perched atop buildings and convert sunlight into clean, renewable power. Installed on rooftops, these systems use solar panels to generate electricity, assisting in the reduction of reliance on conventional grid power. 2. Economic Benefits of Solar Rooftops for Energy Consumption Who doesn't love saving money while protecting the environment? The economic benefits of solar rooftops in Bangalore are significant. By producing your own power, you can slice those heavy energy bills and even bring in an additional money by selling overabundance influence back to the matrix. It's like having a solar side business on your roof! Impact on the Environment Let's be honest: Bangalore's air quality could use a break. When it comes to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases and air pollution, solar rooftops emerge as the cloaked crusaders. You are reducing your carbon footprint and contributing to a cleaner and greener Bangalore by using solar power. When the sun shines on your rooftop panels, it's like giving Mother Nature a high five. 3. Impact of Solar Rooftop in Bangalore Energy Landscape Reduction of Carbon Footprint Bangalore, with its vibrant culture and bustling IT hubs, can also be a hotbed for emissions. Sun powered roofs go about as the eco-heroes, checking carbon impressions and advancing manageability. The city has the potential to make a significant leap toward a more healthy environment and a brighter future for future generations by utilizing solar energy. Integration with Existing Energy Infrastructure The beauty of solar rooftops in Bangalore is that they seamlessly combine solar power with traditional grid energy. These frameworks can undoubtedly incorporate with the current energy foundation, making a more strong and dependable energy organization. It's like combining the best of both worlds to guarantee the city's bustling energy supply's stability and sustainability. 4. Adopting Solar Rooftops: Obstacles and Solutions Initial Cost and Return on Investment We understand that the initial cost of installing solar rooftops may appear to be the bad guy in this sustainability tale. However, rest assured! The return on investment for solar rooftops in Bangalore is brighter than a sunny day thanks to government subsidies, tax incentives, and lower panel prices. Consider it a long-term investment in the environment and your savings. Technical Considerations and Maintenance Although the process of maintaining solar rooftops may appear intimidating, it is not rocket science—rather, it is solar science! To keep your solar panels in top condition, all you need to do is clean them on a regular basis, keep an eye on how well the system is working, and do occasional maintenance checks. Navigating the technical aspects of solar rooftops has never been easier thanks to technological advancements and the assistance of local experts.
Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
Suraj solar and allied industries, Wework galaxy, 43, Residency Road, Bangalore-560025. Mobile number : +91 808 850 7979 Solar Rooftop in Bangalore – Sunease Solar Bangalore, India's Silicon Valley, is known for more than just its booming tech sector. It is also becoming more and more aware of sustainable energy options. The move toward renewable energy, particularly solar power, has gained tremendous momentum as demand for energy rises and prices rise. Sunease Solar, which focuses on Solar Rooftop in Bangalore, has emerged as a leading name among the many businesses in the city. Why Bangalore's Solar Rooftop? Due to its location, Bangalore is an ideal location for harnessing solar energy. The city has a lot of sunshine all year, so it has a lot of potential for making solar power. Solar roofs give homeowners, businesses, and industries access to this renewable resource, lowering their reliance on conventional sources of electricity and contributing to a more environmentally friendly future. Under net metering policies, putting in a solar rooftop system not only helps cut down on electricity costs, but it also gives you a chance to make more money by selling excess power back to the grid. Furthermore, now is the ideal time to switch to solar energy in Bangalore due to the state government of Karnataka's push for its adoption through subsidies and incentives. Sunease Solar is a leading player in the solar energy industry, providing individualized solar rooftop installations for Bangalore's residential, commercial, and industrial properties. Sunease Solar has established a reputation for dependability, expertise, and outstanding customer service thanks to its dedication to providing solar solutions that are both effective and of high quality. Why should I pick Sunease Solar? Individualized Solar Solutions: Sunease Solar offers individualized solutions to meet each client's unique energy needs. Their team assesses your energy requirements and designs a solar rooftop system that maximizes efficiency and savings for a home, office, or industrial unit. High-Quality Materials: The quality of a solar rooftop system's components determines its efficiency and longevity. Sunease Solar only makes use of the best solar panels, inverters, and mounting structures available. This makes sure that the systems will last, work well, and be able to handle the weather in Bangalore. Complete Service: Sunease Solar offers a complete service, from consultation and site evaluation to system design, installation, and upkeep. Their group of specialists handles every one of the specialized and calculated parts of the establishment cycle, making it consistent and bother free for the client. Government incentives and subsidies: Sunease Solar ensures that customers can take full advantage of the financial support for Solar Rooftop in Bangalore by guiding them through the complicated application process for government subsidies and incentives. Cost-effective and friendly to the environment: You will not only save money on your electricity bills but also reduce your carbon footprint when you choose Sunease Solar. Solar energy is a renewable, clean resource that contributes to a more sustainable environment by lowering emissions of greenhouse gases. Benefits of rooftop solar: Lower utility bills: By generating power directly from the sun, a solar rooftop system can significantly reduce electricity costs. In a city like Bangalore, where energy costs are rising, this is especially beneficial. Independence on Energy: You become less reliant on conventional energy sources and their fluctuating costs with solar power. In the long run, a solar roof installation gives you energy independence and security. Gain in Property Value: Solar rooftop systems make buildings and homes more appealing to prospective buyers and renters. Solar installations are regarded as an important addition that frequently raise property values.
Solar Rooftop in Bangalore
The reason that Nogales, Arizona, is much richer than Nogales, Sonora, is simple; it is because of the very different institutions on the two sides of the border, which create very different incentives for the inhabitants of Nogales, Arizona, versus Nogales, Sonora. The United States is also far richer today than either Mexico or Peru because of the way its institutions, both economic and political, shape the incentives of businesses, individuals, and politicians. Each society functions with a set of economic and political rules created and enforced by the state and the citizens collectively. Economic institutions shape economic incentives: the incentives to become educated, to save and invest, to innovate and adopt new technologies, and so on. It is the political process that determines what economic institutions people live under, and it is the political institutions that determine how this process works. For example, it is the political institutions of a nation that determine the ability of citizens to control politicians and influence how they behave. This in turn determines whether politicians are agents of the citizens, albeit imperfect, or are able to abuse the power entrusted to them, or that they have usurped, to amass their own fortunes and to pursue their own agendas, ones detrimental to those of the citizens. Political institutions include but are not limited to written constitutions and to whether the society is a democracy. They include the power and capacity of the state to regulate and govern society. It is also necessary to consider more broadly the factors that determine how political power is distributed in society, particularly the ability of different groups to act collectively to pursue their objectives or to stop other people from pursuing theirs.
Daron Acemoğlu (Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty)
The payments system is the heart of the financial services industry, and most people who work in banking are engaged in servicing payments. But this activity commands both low priority and low prestige within the industry. Competition between firms generally promotes innovation and change, but a bank can gain very little competitive advantage by improving its payment systems, since the customer experience is the result more of the efficiency of the system as a whole than of the efficiency of any individual bank. Incentives to speed payments are weak. Incrementally developed over several decades, the internal systems of most banks creak: it is easier, and implies less chance of short-term disruption, to add bits to what already exists than to engage in basic redesign. The interests of the leaders of the industry have been elsewhere, and banks have tended to see new technology as a means of reducing costs rather than as an opportunity to serve consumer needs more effectively. Although the USA is a global centre for financial innovation in wholesale financial markets, it is a laggard in innovation in retail banking, and while Britain scores higher, it does not score much higher. Martin Taylor, former chief executive of Barclays (who resigned in 1998, when he could not stop the rise of the trading culture at the bank), described the state of payment systems in this way: ‘the systems architecture at the typical big bank, especially if it has grown through merger and acquisition, has departed from the Palladian villa envisaged by its original designers and morphed into a gothic house of horrors, full of turrets, broken glass and uneven paving.
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
But I do think that our national leadership consists of too many lawyers and not enough people from business. I’d like to see a system where we brought in twenty top managers to run the business side of the country and maybe even paid them $1 million a year, tax-free. That would be a real incentive, and then we’d see a lot more talented people interested in public life.
Lee Iacocca (Iacocca: An Autobiography)
A new green economy can easily suffer from the same predatory form of capitalism that created the global economic meltdown. As Kenny Ausubel of Bioneers notes, "The world is suffering from the perverse incentives of 'unnatural capitalism.' When people say 'free market,' I ask if free is a verb. We don't ave a free market but a highly managed and often monopolized market. We used to have somewhat effective antitrust laws in the United States. Now we have banks and companies that are 'too big to fail,' but in truth are too big not to fail. The resulting extremes of concentration of wealth and political power are very bad for business and the economy (not to mention the environment, human rights, and democracy). One result is that small companies can't advance too far against the big players with their legions of lawyers and Capitol Hill lobbyists, when in truth it's small and medium-sized companies that provide the majority of jobs as well as innovation.
Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
The only incentive you want to offer is the promise of a solution to their problem.
Ryan Levesque (Ask: The Counterintuitive Online Formula to Discover Exactly What Your Customers Want to Buy...Create a Mass of Raving Fans...and Take Any Business to the Next Level)
Startups – as well as enterprises – building platforms, often make the error of engineering viral growth before designing the right incentives for users to stay on in an engaged fashion.
Sangeet Paul Choudary (Platform Scale: How an emerging business model helps startups build large empires with minimum investment)
But the current investment banking model—whether applied in a standalone institution such as Goldman or in a broad financial conglomerate such as Deutsche Bank—is at the heart of the problems the finance sector poses for the real economy. Investment banks today engage in securities issuance, corporate advice and asset management; they make markets in equities and FICC, and trade in these markets on their own account. It is only necessary to list these functions to see that each of these activities conflicts with all the others. Each should be undertaken in distinct institutions. And with lower volumes of inter-bank trading, a diminished role for public equity markets and much more direct investment by asset managers the scale of most of these activities should be much reduced. Among all the actors in the finance sector today, only the asset manager, who typically earns a fee calculated as a percentage of funds under management, is rewarded for idleness. The profits of a segregated deposit-taking bank would similarly depend primarily on the scale of the deposit base, and secondarily on its success in making good loans. Dedicated channels of capital allocation have a more appropriate incentive structure than activities focused on trading and transactions. Whenever
John Kay (Other People's Money: The Real Business of Finance)
1. The conglomerate movement, “with all its fancy rhetoric about synergism and leverage.” 2. Accountants who played footsie with stock-promoting managements by certifying earnings that weren’t earnings at all. 3. “Modern” corporate treasurers who looked upon their company pension funds as new-found profit centers and pressured their investment advisers into speculating with them. 4. Investment advisers who massacred clients’ portfolios because they were trying to make good on the over-promises that they had made to attract the business. 5. The new breed of investment managers who bought and churned the worst collection of new issues and other junk in history, and the underwriters who made fortunes bringing them out. 6. Elements of the financial press which promoted into new investment geniuses a group of neophytes who didn’t even have the first requisite for managing other people’s money—namely, a sense of responsibility. 7. The securities salesmen who peddle the items with the best stories—or the biggest markups—even though such issues were totally unsuited to the customers’ needs. 8. The sanctimonious partners of major investment houses who wrung their hands over all these shameless happenings while they deployed an army of untrained salesmen to forage among even less trained investors. 9. Mutual fund managers who tried to become millionaires overnight by using every gimmick imaginable to manufacture their own paper performance. 10. Portfolio managers who collected bonanza incentives of the “heads I win, tails you lose” kind, which made them fortunes in the bull market but turned the portfolios they managed into disasters in the bear market. 11. Security analysts who forgot about their professional ethics to become storytellers and let their institutions be taken in by a whole parade of confidence men. This was the “list of horrors that people in our field did to set the stage for the greatest blood bath in forty years,
Adam Smith (Supermoney (Wiley Investment Classics Book 38))
As a legal and economic instrument, the zone presides over a cocktail of enticements and legal exemptions that are sometimes mixed together with domestic civil laws, sometimes manipulated by business to create international law, and sometimes adopted by the nation in its entirety. Incentives vary in every location but might include: holidays from income or sales taxes, dedicated utilities like electricity or broadband, deregulation of labor laws, prohibition of labor unions and strikes, deregulation of environmental laws, streamlined customs and access to cheap imported or domestic labor, cheap land and foreign ownership of property, exemption from import/export duties, foreign language services, or relaxed licensing requirements.
Keller Easterling (Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space)
I started reading. Was I hallucinating? Had I really once loved this book? And were these truly the views of groovy Berkeley, California, women in the 1970s? Interspersed between paeans to the glory of homemade bread and recipes for cashew gravy were meditations on the nature of women that struck me as so essentialist and retrograde that they might have come from a fundamentalist religious sect. “I would never go on record as saying ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’” wrote one of the authors. “But to my mind the most effective front for social change, the critical point where our efforts will count the most, is not in business or profession … but in the home and community, where the problems start.” In the home, kneading a big batch of cracked wheat bread, was where women—the “nurturant” sex—belonged: “No paycheck comes at the end of the month,” the authors wrote, “and no promotion: the incentive here is much less obvious, and much more worthy of you as a human being.
Jennifer Reese (Make the Bread, Buy the Butter: What You Should and Shouldn't Cook from Scratch -- Over 120 Recipes for the Best Homemade Foods)
The Keystone XL pipeline argument has become a ridiculous proxy for the environmentalist lobby’s complete disdain of the oil companies and a very pro-business U.S. energy policy Equally, the irrelevant case of Solyndra became the headline for the ‘uselessness’ of government incentives for renewable technology development. We should expect to see all the partisan dumbness this country can so easily muster on both sides when a gas tax to support renewable energy development is introduced. No matter. Its time has come, and I hope the next President of the United States has the courage to at least suggest it and force a discussion. Our current one clearly doesn't.
Dan Dicker (Shale Boom, Shale Bust: The Myth of Saudi America)
Most neoclassical economists would argue that state-owned firms will inevitably be less efficient than private ones because the state lacks the proper incentives to run enterprises efficiently. The state does not have to fear bankruptcy, since it can keep businesses going out of tax dollars or, at worst, by printing money. It also has strong incentives to use the firm for political ends like job creation and patronage. These deficiencies of public ownership have been the underlying justification for the global move toward privatization over the past decade. But state-owned enterprises can be run more or less efficiently, and any final judgment as to the efficiency price paid for nationalization has to be measured against the entrepreneurial capabilities of that society’s private sector. In France, nationalized companies have often been allowed considerable managerial discretion and operate not much differently from their private sector counterparts.36
Francis Fukuyama (Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)
Are you creating a way for your middle tier customers to buy your products by giving them discounts and incentives? 
Ellis Howell (Sales and Marketing 80/20: What Everyone Ought To Know About Increasing Effectivity In Business)
Work through the politics. Even political problems are soluble. Most people in business are rational, at least in their business conduct. They react to incentives. Therefore, when you face political opposition, it usually means that your solution has negative implications for someone in the organization. So politics is just people acting in their own interests. To work through the politics, you must think about how your solution affects the players in an organization. You must then build a consensus for change that takes account of the different incentives and organizational factors driving the politics.
Ethan M. Rasiel (The McKinsey Way)
FOCUSING TOO MUCH ON THE NUMBERS In the second example, I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result. Interestingly, I see this same problem play out in many consumer Internet startups. I often see teams that maniacally focus on their metrics around customer acquisition and retention. This usually works well for customer acquisition, but not so well for retention. Why? For many products, metrics often describe the customer acquisition goal in enough detail to provide sufficient management guidance. In contrast, the metrics for customer retention do not provide enough color to be a complete management tool. As a result, many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience. This generally results in a frantic numbers chase that does not end in a great product. It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
Obama’s failure to act has been blamed on his inexperience, his unfamiliarity with finance and business, and a personal tendency to avoid conflict (or, to be blunt, on his being a coward). Some, including my colleague Charles Morris, also feel that the political system is now so gridlocked and dysfunctional that transformative policy changes are simply no longer feasible by anyone, so that Obama really couldn’t have done anything even if he had tried. If so, then we’re really screwed. But if anyone had a shot, it was Barack Obama in 2009, and he didn’t try. Admittedly, it would have taken real personal courage, and it would have been a hard fight—Wall Street would not have just rolled over. The logic and incentive structures of America’s political duopoly are such that in taking the path of least resistance, Obama was surely acting in his, and his party’s, rational self-interest. But whatever Obama’s personal motivations, America (and indeed the whole world) will pay dearly for his failure for a long time.
Charles H. Ferguson (Inside Job: The Rogues Who Pulled Off the Heist of the Century)