4 ms·
There's a quip about organizing sales orgs that resonates with me: Expect every salesperson in your company to optimize their own compensation. If you want to
by ethbr1 2y ago
There's a quip about organizing sales orgs that resonates with me:
Expect every salesperson in your company to optimize their own compensation. If you want to change their behavior, then change your sales compensation plan to drive the behavior you want.
I don't think this is appreciated enough at the management and CEO level of engineering-based companies.
How many engineering-tied metrics were explicitly part of Boeing's CEO's comp plan? If "Boeing makes less money, but produces safer planes" = more money to the CEO, then that happens.
And yet we're suprised when, absent that, individuals act in their own self interest and optimize for bad engineering outcomes.
- dghlsakjg 2y agoThis expands to any department, or really any human activity. I had an econ teacher who loved the phrase Rules, Incentives, Action, Outcome. She even had pens with RIAO printed out for students. The meaning is that each step led inevitably to the other, but also that you could start at the outcome end, and work your way backwards to what rules created that outcome.
- dsr_ 2y agoSales organizations are often the most game-theoretic rational folks in an organization: a large fraction of their compensation is directly attributable to recent efforts. That doesn't make them honest or efficient or trustworthy, just canny and responsive. By way of contrast, operations can only be seen negatively (if things are working, that's normal, and if things are not, that's bad) and development usually has conflicting incentives (stability! and features! and responsiveness! and bugfixes!) with cycle times and group responsibilites obscuring attribution.
- gsf_emergency_2 2y agoThis is why founder mode "works".. it is a way to overcome game theory* . (I hope that does not mean that resurrecting George Washington is necessary) *At least in the von Neumann-Morgenstern style