I suspect that the author and many of the commenters have experienced the "bad project manager" effect. MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers a

I suspect that the author and many of the commenters have experienced the "bad project manager" effect. MANY people have dealt with terrible project managers and therefore assume all project managers are bad. This is because great project managers are very rare. The same is true about incentive schemes. Most of them are improperly designed and/or get hit by Goodheart's law. [0] As a counter point, this article [1] about designing incentives for farm labor is excellent and shows that with careful thought, incentives can dramatically increase output. I've also been reading Deming's last book [2] and he is VERY against sales commissions. Some of this is probably bad design (e.g. 100% of the commissions for a sale go to one person) but I do feel he makes a valid point that everyone at a firm should benefit from helping the customer. Highly recommend it as an alternative to the more mainstream business books. 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law 1 - https://archive.is/https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/an-amazing-economics-experiment-and-how-it-got-field-workers-to-pick-a-lot-more-fruit.html https://archive.is/https://slate.com/culture/2008/08/an-amaz... 2 - https://amzn.to/4wfAAjU https://amzn.to/4wfAAjU