Chapter 5

Incentives for Enterprise

 

Changing the attitude and behavior of hundreds of thousands of people is very, very hard to accomplish. …You can't mandate it, can't engineer it. What you can do is create the conditions for transformation. You can provide incentives.

—Lou Gerstner, Former CEO of IBM1

INDEED, INCENTIVES ARE the most powerful practice for creating a culture of innovation. However, traditional incentives in many organizations may be aligned for seniority, loyalty, or sales productivity, but not for innovation. We may believe that rewards for seniority and loyalty increase productivity and retain good employees. Our instinct is to treat failure as bad and success as good. So we reward success and penalize failure. Even for little ...

Get Unrelenting Innovation: How to Build a Culture for Market Dominance now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.