Good 2015 article, but some extra considerations that rarely get explicitly mentioned: - the construction of a system of incentives/goals(/'recognition') is a

Good 2015 article, but some extra considerations that rarely get explicitly mentioned: - the construction of a system of incentives/goals(/'recognition') is a large component in building a team/organization - people within the same org often have different incentives, and possibly over different timeframes; sometimes very different timeframes. Sometimes time-bound, sometimes event-bound (achieve X before IPO/Series X/ options vest/market crashes). - often incentives are constructed to set teams/depts at each others' throats, while paying lip-service to the concept of cooperation: salespeople get compensated short-term for getting sales, marketing get compensated for generating buzz and promising new features, QA and build get compensated for stability, performance, absence of bugs, engineering (typically) compensated for a basket of metrics intended to deliver product-market fit and growth. Essentially the VCs figure that within a year they will either fire the VP of Sales or Engineering. - the canonical example is a salesperson selling a deal with a toxic customer or overpromising nonexistent stuff which engineering won't be able to deliver, then pocketing their sales commission, buying the luxury car and quietly exiting the building - incentives can be conflicting between departments (this ain't Barney the Dinosaur), and designing that well is a Goldilocks quantity. Often you don't know the (actual) incentives/goals/OKR of your manager, or other depts: - sometimes, with enough time, you can deduce by observing (who got 'recognized'? promoted? fired? reorg'ed? quit? and who actually did the work?) You ask around and figure who's going up and who's going down. - I've seen a case where in retrospect a manager was simply there for the duration of his sponsored executive MBA, and didn't give a hoot about product-related metrics. The most important thing for him was not to actually fix anything or release anything, but keep the other managers around him sweet and happy, even though the company was losing huge market share and failing, stock was tanking. Eventually (soon after graduating from the MBA) he jumped off the sinking ship and went back to his former employer. (The company failed and its assets were firesaled. But this didn't affect his career. This first made me realize that it's quite common to have a massive disparity in (nominal or actual) incentives) > People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. Corollary 3b: what they're rewarded for is often not explicitly stated. So people have a certain innate or acquired level of cynicism about what they're officially being told ('communicated'), and how they can game it and collude with others. Counter-Corollary 1. + Corollary 2.: before attempting to un-rot the fish from either the top or (especially) the bottom, stop, look both ways, listen to your intuition and think "Who appears to be benefiting, or at least is unperturbed by the current state of rottenness? What do their incentives seem to be? [and who in turn constructed those incentives?]" Corollary 2. When does the fish un-rot from the top? > Finally, don't expect people to enlighten you and tell you what your blind spots are. Becoming a manager means losing the privilege of being told what's what. It's a trap to think of oneself as just the same reasonable guy and why wouldn't they want to talk to me. The right question is, why would they? That part, tucked down the bottom, is brilliant, and should probably be the lede paragraph.