This is unrealistic. How do you measure whether someone "does a good job"? What if their job is to earn money while taking a certain amount of risk? This is ult

This is unrealistic. How do you measure whether someone "does a good job"? What if their job is to earn money while taking a certain amount of risk? This is ultimately what all banks do: all loans have a risk they won't be paid back, and the job of the bank is to earn money while managing that risk. I think if you tried to refine these ideas into something more specific and concrete, that would apply on a daily or yearly basis with respect to employee performance and compensation, you'd see that this idea needs to be a lot more fleshed out. You haven't considered how incentives play out at multiple levels in an organization or how to construct the right ones. There is no such thing as "just pay people for doing good work". The world doesn't have a ruler that can decree this and if it did there's still no way to enforce that it happens. You need to think about how to structure incentives for each person in the organization so that they shape behavior in the right direction. Personal liability is an incentive. "Pay people for doing good work" is not an incentive nor a policy that can be directly implemented. It is at best a goal that could be refined into policy and incentives after defining what exactly it really means. (What is "good work" and how do you know it when you see it?) The author of the article is advocating for creating a much stronger incentive to do the right thing by making people who work at banks personally liable for the outcomes of their decisions. The author specifically makes the point that people outside the system don't how to recognize "good work", but people within it do, and by making them personally liable, they will think twice before doing bad work.