3 ms·

Incentives are a hell of a drug. My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company through a necessary transfor

Incentives are a hell of a drug. My last job was at a company where the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company through a necessary transformation (it was in a long-tail business). The individual contributors were smart, experienced, and good people. But between the top and the bottom there was a complete disconnect, as people were driven by incentives that rewarded individuals and teams for things that did not serve the company as a whole. Not an unusual scenario in any large organization, but it was beyond frustrating.

indigochill 3y ago
How do you get a CEO with vision to structure the incentives towards achieving the vision (presumably starting with the incentives for his direct reports and maybe coaching them to do the same for their reports, and on down the chain)?
- throwawaysleep 3y ago
  I am not sure you can without the CEO understanding all the ways the incentive can be gamed or hacked. The CEO would need to be as good as the workers at their particular job roles.
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    If the workers are in already with the vision, the CEO needs to understand the managers “only”.
  - pstuart 3y ago
    The CEO I referred to apparently was aware of structural problems and approached them as "I have to let them fail first". This is not entirely unreasonable but painful as hell to stand by and watch.
stcredzero 3y ago
Incentives are a hell of a drug. This is the Homo sapiens version of the Alignment Problem.
Terr_ 3y ago
> Incentives are a hell of a drug. A more-prosaic example: I worked at a company where their internal enterprise software was sometimes the battleground between different groups, in particular Operations kept trying to put in guardrails to prevent commission-driven Sales from closing unprofitable deals.
- lazystar 3y ago
  hmm. in hindsight, that sounds like the first company i worked at, as a dev on the ops team. i was oblivious to those higher level strategies, and set out improving the internal orchestration software. it felt like each optimization and bug fix i released caused the rest of the ops team to resent me, even though it drastically reduced after hours pages and let them focus more on their long term projects. now its pretty clear to me that i was an expert beginner; its likely true that the work i was doing in the ops team ended up improving the sales team's positions with leadership, rather than the ops team that i was a part of. in the end, though, our customers benefitted from the better internal ops tooling, and the customer experience improved. some deals were unprofitable from an ops perspective, but in my opinion the ops perspective misses the forest for the trees. sometimes a short term loss is a longer term win, and thats literally what a sales team is for. if ops doesnt trust sales, the org suffers.
darkerside 3y ago
> the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company How did you know? I ask because most people in a position to know would also be part of the middle that you are blaming for the company's dysfunction.

indigochill 3y ago

How do you get a CEO with vision to structure the incentives towards achieving the vision (presumably starting with the incentives for his direct reports and maybe coaching them to do the same for their reports, and on down the chain)?

throwawaysleep 3y ago
I am not sure you can without the CEO understanding all the ways the incentive can be gamed or hacked. The CEO would need to be as good as the workers at their particular job roles.
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  If the workers are in already with the vision, the CEO needs to understand the managers “only”.
- pstuart 3y ago
  The CEO I referred to apparently was aware of structural problems and approached them as "I have to let them fail first". This is not entirely unreasonable but painful as hell to stand by and watch.

stcredzero 3y ago

Incentives are a hell of a drug. This is the Homo sapiens version of the Alignment Problem.

Terr_ 3y ago

> Incentives are a hell of a drug. A more-prosaic example: I worked at a company where their internal enterprise software was sometimes the battleground between different groups, in particular Operations kept trying to put in guardrails to prevent commission-driven Sales from closing unprofitable deals.

lazystar 3y ago
hmm. in hindsight, that sounds like the first company i worked at, as a dev on the ops team. i was oblivious to those higher level strategies, and set out improving the internal orchestration software. it felt like each optimization and bug fix i released caused the rest of the ops team to resent me, even though it drastically reduced after hours pages and let them focus more on their long term projects. now its pretty clear to me that i was an expert beginner; its likely true that the work i was doing in the ops team ended up improving the sales team's positions with leadership, rather than the ops team that i was a part of. in the end, though, our customers benefitted from the better internal ops tooling, and the customer experience improved. some deals were unprofitable from an ops perspective, but in my opinion the ops perspective misses the forest for the trees. sometimes a short term loss is a longer term win, and thats literally what a sales team is for. if ops doesnt trust sales, the org suffers.

darkerside 3y ago

> the CEO had the vision and the personality to lead the company How did you know? I ask because most people in a position to know would also be part of the middle that you are blaming for the company's dysfunction.